


Sleight of Hand

by racketghost



Series: Strange Moons [12]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 100 lbs of pining in a 10 lb pine bag, 69 (nice), Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, Awkward First Times, Bathing/Washing, Brief discussion of suicide, Crowley Has Chronic Pain (Good Omens), Dust Bowl Hand Jobs (I'm going to hell), Gratuitous Historical References, Hurt/Comfort, I am become death destroyer of headcanons, I must wade through a river of angst for one second of smut, M/M, Mutual Pining, No kissing they are Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, Pining while fucking, Praise Kink for Everyone, Strength Kink, This is just a redux of episode 3: Hard Times, World War II, Worst Tags of All Time, desert sex redux, exhausted by my own metaphors, i make my own rules, i promise there is a happy ending, i wrote this for myself but y'all can read it, lots of rimming, this is just them having sad sex throughout history
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-02-25 05:09:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 70,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21750544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/racketghost/pseuds/racketghost
Summary: This is just the 20-minute cold open of episode 3 injected with sex and too many metaphors.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Strange Moons [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1480787
Comments: 1085
Kudos: 1143
Collections: Best Aziraphale and Crowley, Ixnael’s Recommendations, The Strange Mooniverse, Tip Top Stories, kashiichan's favourites





	1. XX

London, 1941

Blink and you’ll miss it.

It’s there in the shuffling, in the palming— a careful wrist movement, a flick of the fingers.

Now you see it, now you don’t.

It’s there passing each other on the street, sitting across from each other on public transport, beneath the table at a café. It’s there in the passing of pots of tea, glasses of wine. It is there behind the pulled curtains of a certain bookshop in Soho, between the shelves, on the sofa.

It is most of all here across this leather bag of books, on the ruined mountainous heap of previously hallowed ground. There is a statue on fire behind him, ivory hair painted fire-gold, guiding the eyes away— a bit of misdirection.

Aziraphale is saying something— something about kindness. Something that doesn’t quite get parsed out in Crowley’s head but still manages to light up the auditory hair cells in his ears, tickle all the way down his spine, sit squarely somewhere in his hips.

Crowley straightens up, tries to clean off his glasses, get them back on.

“Shut up,” he just says, _the curtains are still open. The audience is still watching._

“Oh, the _books_ ,” Aziraphale is saying, despondent, and Crowley pulls on his glasses, tries to swallow his smile, “they’ll all be blown to—“

That leather handle is in his hand and the heft of books is too.

“Little demonic miracle of my own,” he says, and does not miss the way that Aziraphale looks at him in suspended wonder, his eyes wide. He does not miss how their fingers kiss across those old books in that old bag— that familiar magnetic attraction of their skin— close enough at last to spark. The current closing between them. A bit of Faraday’s law. Now you see it.

He releases the bag into Aziraphale’s grip, steps away.

Now you don’t.

“Lift home?”

There is fire in his veins, more than usual, because Aziraphale is outlined in flame and had thanked him, _thanked him_. In his own off-handed way, for saving the books and maybe his life too. And that’s enough, Crowley thinks, enough to tide him over for a few more decades.

But still, something about it stings.

It isn’t the cold air or the airborne dust. It had not been the spilled holy water— the thing he wants perhaps second most to Aziraphale— or the weaponized flecks of church shrapnel that bounced off his skin. It had not even been the persistent sizzling of the consecrated ground working its way up through his shoes, turning the marrow in his bones to liquid fire.

He had _heard_ things, of course he had. He had heard, long ago, about the _Thule Society_ and their greedy thirst for any bit of western esotericism that fit their narrative. Narratives that watered the seeds of the _Deutsche Arbeiterpartei_. That name-stealing bastard Aleister walking along the fringes of it, stoking the fire. A Cistercian monk named Liebenfels pumping out magazines that straddled occultism and racial-purity. Magic ritual as politics. The _Völkisch_ movement. Blood and soil.

He had heard, for instance, that the Nazis were desperately after certain books. Books of prophecy. Books of magic. He had heard that Hitler himself had gotten his ear bent around Madame Blavatsky’s old philosophies and had been furiously digging through every library and book seller in Europe-- looking through titles for ones to keep and burning the ones he didn’t. Collections of Robert Nixon, first edition Mother Shiptons, old issues of _Ostara_ magazine, anything by Guido von List.

Which is how he knew, of course, that they would come looking for Aziraphale.

It is why he had gotten himself tied up in the espionage game in the first place. British counterintelligence. Nights held down in Pressbaum. Joining the _Ordo Novi Templi_. Brushing up on Hermetic Qabalah.

Of course Harmony had recognized him. Greta too. It had been difficult to miss her doe-eyes fawning over him from the back of those conference halls, mooning over presentations on runic lore.

But what he _doesn’t_ know, even now, is why Aziraphale had said exactly nothing to him about any of it. And that, Crowley supposes, is what stings the most.

The ride home is starched with a stiffening silence, the edges of it so sharp Crowley doesn’t even want to think about being the first to break it, afraid he might cut himself and start bleeding all over, bleed out.

He is used to this by now— of course he is. He is used to containing the spill of himself, of not getting Aziraphale wet with the overflow. Not anymore. He is accustomed of course to saying the word _love love love_ over and over again in repetitious harmonies, woven into everything, without saying anything at all. He is accustomed to getting nothing back but echoes of his own voice, shouting into what he realizes is perhaps an empty cave.

Doesn’t matter. Do it anyway. Get nothing back.

Now you see it.

He grips the edge of the steering wheel with a bruising intensity, files his back teeth together.

And then he lets go, releases, like he always does. Breathes it in. Breathes it out.

Now you don’t.

Because he knows now better than ever before that they are not native speakers of the same mother tongue. Original stock be damned. They speak something else, some other animal call— some fluid reimagining of language that is layered to the point that they are saying two things at once— always— another magic trick they can perform together. A body sawed in half on stage. Two women in the same box. A head out one end and legs out the other. The woman with her head in the box incapable of hearing and the woman bisected at the hips yelling at her anyway.

The angel is sitting, somewhat white-knuckled, next to him, gripping onto the handle of that old leather bag and chewing at his lip. Crowley can tell he is about to say something, probably something like, _eyes on the road, Crowley;_ or _, you cannot go this speed at this hour you will wake up babies;_ or _, I know you can see in the dark but please turn on your lights._

But he does not say any of those things. And instead there is a quiet: “How did you know where to find me?”

_Because you are the world and I am the thing that orbits you._

“Space rock,” he says, and bites down on the side of his cheek.

“Space— _what_?” Aziraphale turns and looks at him, his eyebrows nearly kissing.

“Space rock. It’s—“ he waves his hand and can tell even without looking the way Aziraphale swallows back the admonition: _hands on the wheel_.

“It’s nothing,” he finishes.

Aziraphale’s eyes are blue, gray, gold as they shift endlessly under the moving lamplights, the glow of wet pavement.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Crowley says, quietly even though they are alone in this car. It is a habit that he is finding harder and harder to break— the inability to be himself around Aziraphale even in private— always zipped up, on alert, under the table. Palm the card you want to hide in your left hand and brandish the one you don’t in your right.

“Tell you?”

“Tell me that you were dealing with the Nazis,” his words are hot, _sharp_ , and he feels a stab of regret as soon as he speaks them.

“I— I don’t know, really. I figured that… well you’ve been so busy and we haven’t seen each other in… in a while,” he is looking down at his hands and at the bag and the air is stretched so thin between them it feels like it’s going to snap. “I thought I could handle this.”

There is something unspoken that hovers there at the end of his sentence. Something that feels a lot like, _I never expected to be betrayed_.

And maybe that’s his flaw, Crowley thinks, that the angel is a bit naive, even after all this time, that he is incapable of reading intent underneath action.

 _Like that I love you underneath all these touches_.

“We have to communicate better, Aziraphale,” he says, and does not look at him.

Aziraphale looks studiously out the passenger window, avoids his eyes.

“I know,” he says finally, softly, “I should have told you, alright? Is that what you need to hear?”

They are at the bookshop and Crowley wonders how they got here so quickly. Had he even been paying attention to the drive? How many lights did he miss, how many stop signs did he blow through?

He turns and looks at him, Aziraphale looking like he wants to jump out of the window, run inside and slam the door shut.

“Just,” there is that lump in his throat and he tries to pull words up out around it, “just looking out for you.”

He tries to say something like an apology but it commits suicide in his throat around that lump, strangling itself dead.

Aziraphale turns his head, looks over at him across the scattered moonlight on the dash, the filtered street glow.

“Say it again,” Aziraphale says.

“Say what?”

There is a shine on his eyes like glass, like deep water.

“ _Home._ ”

Crowley glances behind Aziraphale’s head to the familiar red pillars of the bookshop facade, the glass with that incorrect name stamped on it. He can see their reflection there, through the window, through the car, can see his dark hat and the white loveliness of Aziraphale’s shoulders.

He swallows and meets his eyes, takes off the sunglasses. Now you see it.

“Home,” he says, “Angel, come on, you’re home.”

* * *

He is taking them out of the bag.

One at a time, fingers brushing over the bindings, the spines, the cover plates. There are little _ex libros_ embossings on the first page of some of them, sometimes decorated with tiny books themselves, metallic filigree, flowery flourishes.

“Are they okay?” Crowley asks, standing in the entryway to the backroom like a coat rack, his shoulders feeling skinny under his jacket. The bottom of his feet feel crisped beyond recognition, like he is standing on a something that isn’t quite skin anymore.

“They are,” Aziraphale says softly, not looking up.

Crowley lets out a breath, his shoulders dropping.

“Oh. Good. I wasn’t quite sure— thought maybe I messed things up.”

Aziraphale says nothing, his eyes still wet and deep, looking down.

Crowley swallows and tries to make it to the sofa without Aziraphale looking up at him, tries to hide the way he walks like the ground here is consecrated too.

He makes it about half-way, somewhere in the middle of the parquet floor, before he sucks in what is an unmistakably painful breath.

He didn’t mean too— but there’s nothing here across this ocean of floor to the couch, nothing to lean on, no pew to brace against, no bookshelf to crutch himself on.

Aziraphale looks up, finally, blinking at him trying to make it to the sofa like a man who has forgotten how to walk.

“What are you—“ he starts, and then stops, following him down with his eyes as Crowley sits on the floor, breathing between his teeth.

“I’m okay,” Crowley hears himself saying, “I’m fine. Just— something in my shoe, I think. A bit of rubble. Some church dust.”

There is church dust, he realizes, all over him, stinging just the slightest bit. It is coating the tip of his naked ear and he brushes that faint humming burn away with the back of his hand.

“It— oh, it still burns?”

“Nah,” he says, chewing a bit on the inside of his cheek, pretending to fish around in his shoe for the inexistent stone.

He tries to pull his legs underneath of him, stand on those scorched feet again.

But before he can get very far there are hands behind his back, cupping up under his knees. He has not been touched like this in years, not since— he shakes his head, scrambling up the memory, trying to ignore how the marrow of his bones is on fire for a very different reason.

“It still burns,” Aziraphale says flatly, hefting him easily in his arms.

“It really doesn’t,” Crowley chokes out, “I’m _fine_.”

“You know for a demon you are quite a dreadful liar.”

Aziraphale lowers him to the couch, sinks to his knees in front of him on the floor.

“Show me,” he says, turning his gaze to meet Crowley’s for the first time since they came inside.

Crowley swallows, reaches down to tug at his shoes.

“It just sort of tingles,” he says, and he does not miss the way his tongue forks a bit when he says it.

Aziraphale pulls them off the rest of the way, rolls down the black socks. Those hands are gentle on his ankle bones, lifting them to look at the bottom of his feet.

Aziraphale closes his eyes and sighs, his shoulders dropping. He opens them to stare at the pink and shiny heel of what is obviously burned skin.

“This looks dreadful,” he says quietly, “probably second-degree. You should not have gone in that church, Crowley.”

Crowley tries to pull his foot away, sucks at his teeth.

“What was I going to do,” he starts, struggling against the hand that is holding his ankle, “let you get shot by Nazis? Bombed by my own demonic intervention?”

“You could’ve let them shoot me,” he is saying, palpating a thumb around the edge of the burnt skin, checking for blisters, “I could have gotten myself outside and you could’ve removed the bullet. I could’ve healed myself up.”

“Believe me when I say that I would rather blow up a hundred churches than have to dig around your insides for a bullet again,” Crowley says, sucking in air around his teeth.

“I have an analgesic upstairs, to help with the pain,” Aziraphale says, ignoring him, “I’m afraid there isn’t much to do for burns other than cool down the skin and let them heal.”

He is standing up, brushing at the front of his waistcoat.

“Stay put,” he says, “and keep them off the floor.”

He disappears somewhere behind a bookshelf, back to that tiny kitchenette, and then returns a moment later, basin in hand.

“Let me roll these up,” he is saying, that porcelain basin set in front of him, those hands reaching already for Crowley’s ankles— rolling up the hems, guiding them into the cold water.

He hisses as they sink in, molds himself back into the sofa.

“Is it okay?” Aziraphale is looking up at him with worry in his eyes, his hands still firm around his ankles.

“It’s okay,” Crowley breathes out, through his teeth, “feels good actually.”

“That’s good,” Aziraphale says, and Crowley can feel his thumb rubbing tiny circles into the bone there.

Crowley considers him for a second, considers the narrow hitch of his shoulders, as if he is nervous, considers the strong set of his jaw.

There are still air raid sirens broadcasting across London, the rattle of the blitz vibrating the windows.

“Did you ever think this would happen again?” Aziraphale is asking, staring down at his feet, at the water they are dipped in.

“What?” Crowley asks, looking down at those white curls, the backs of his ears.

“Another world war. More poison gas. More flamethrowers.”

He can see the stress come out of his shoulders, can see them drop along with his face.

Crowley looks outside to that night sky— can see the fluorescence of refracted electric light held suspended in all that airborne dust, the searchlights cutting through the dark.

“I hoped it wouldn’t,” he says, looking away from the window, “I guess I knew it was a possibility but I hoped it wouldn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale says, “for thinking that you had anything to do with the Nazis.”

He says it so easily, like it’s nothing, like apologies can just flow like water from a tap.

“It’s fine,” Crowley says, his throat feeling suddenly tight, “don’t fret.”

“No, really I—“ Aziraphale is squeezing his ankles a bit tightly, worrying at his bottom lip, “I shouldn’t have said that. I just— I haven’t—“ he takes a deep breath, the shoulders up around his ears again, “where have you been?”

The sound of the air raid sirens is unnerving, spiking his heart rate.

“Austria,” he says, “Pressbaum. And then Hungary, Germany too.”

“Is that how they knew you?” He turns those gray eyes on him in the dim light, and Crowley can see the ache there, the inability to understand where Crowley has been for all this time and why he hadn’t told him about it. A mirror to his own frustrations. The familiar dance. Two women in the same box, sawed in half at the hips.

“How long has it been?” Crowley can hear himself asking, ignoring Aziraphale’s question.

“Six years.”

Six years apart— six years in the German underbelly, six years of Hitler Youth haircuts and Hugo Boss jackets. Six years of espionage. He used to think it was better. Better than being on the front lines, better than taking bullets in the hip, barbed wire to the arms.

“That’s quite a long time,” Aziraphale says softly, his thumbs pressing circles against his ankle bones again.

But it _isn’t_ better, he knows.

He finds his own reflection in those watercolor eyes, and he knows that the price of admission for Aziraphale’s intimacy— the bullets and the chlorine gas and the nights in soggy trenches— is worth it. Worth it to trudge back to him every time, let Aziraphale find the new and terrible holes that have been punctured into him, let him seal them shut.

“Too long,” Crowley says quietly, maneuvering around the inexplicable tightness in his throat.

Aziraphale looks up, finds Crowley’s eyes looking down on him. Then he narrows his gaze, scanning over the gray flecks of a ruined church sitting on his clothes, his hair, his cheeks.

Crowley brushes at the dust on his face, the very smallest tingling of consecrated ground refined into weaponized nano-particles. Just barely burning.

“Does the dust burn too?”

Crowley tries very hard not to brush away at the bit that is on his forehead, that fine, nearly invisible coating.

“Barely. It’s nothing really.”

The line of Aziraphale’s mouth hardens into a grim set, his eyes scanning over the layer of dust on him, everywhere.

“We should clean it off of you,” he says, and Crowley can see that there is something else underneath the hitched up shoulders, underneath the stiff relearning of how to be together again. Like muscles that haven’t been used in six years, breaking the crust of atrophy, feet that have fallen asleep.

Crowley licks his dry lips, knowing what that means.

“It’s not so bad,” he says quietly.

 _Lead you not into temptation_ , he reminds himself, and closes his eyes. 

But Aziraphale is standing, wedging a hand underneath his knees on the sofa, pulling him close to his chest.

“Come on,” he says, as Crowley puts an arm around his shoulders, knowing how this is going to go and trying to find it within himself to be upset about it, “let’s clean you up.”

“Angel, I swear, it’s not terrible.”

But he lets himself be lifted anyway, lets those deceptively strong arms crush him up against that chest, lets his head drift over to pillow on that shoulder.

“Bad liar,” is all Aziraphale says, hitching him up higher in his arms.

“Where are you taking me?” He asks, and knows better than to squirm.

Aziraphale is walking away from the couch, out of the backroom.

He knows, of course, where he is taking him. He is taking him to that place where they have been before, so many times, that place that Crowley can smell in his dreams.

He can smell it now even— the sudden influx of humidity in that tiny upstairs bedroom, Aziraphale having pulled some miracle down while carrying him.

“You know where,” Aziraphale says, taking the stairs easily.

There is dust on Aziraphale’s jacket too and it sings along the nerves of his cheek as it presses there. But he does not pull away, no matter how bad it gets, no matter how it pulses with each of Aziraphale’s footfalls up that wide staircase.

It looks the same— it always does— no matter how often Aziraphale changes the towels, adds more soaps, gathers new bathrobes. The honeycomb tile is the same, has been for decades, the stretch of peeling paint in the ceiling corner hanging only slightly lower.

There’s a response that thrums up from this space and echoes in his bones, his heart, his blood. It redirects the currents of his fluids, all of them, pulls and pushes until his heart is too loud in his ears, certain parts of him stiffening and other parts softening.

“Okay,” Aziraphale says quietly, lowering him to sit on that little three-legged stool in the dark, “lights off or on?”

He doesn’t miss the hitch in his voice when he says it, something still stretched between them.

Crowley licks his lips, considering him there in the dark, the wet shine of his eyes as they blink and try to adjust to the dim light.

He digs his fingernails into his palm, knowing that Aziraphale probably prefers the dark, prefers to not see him, all of him, certainly not now. But he _wants_ to be seen, just this once.

“On,” he says, and he is surprised to hear Aziraphale let out a relieved breath.

“Oh good,” he says, “I was hoping you’d say that.”

His legs are too long for this bathroom, spread out at full length, balanced on his heel.

“Don’t put your feet on the floor,” Aziraphale is saying, “keep them up.”

There are hands at his collar, pushing off the jacket.

“Ridiculous,” he is muttering, threading it off his arms.

“What is?” Crowley breathes, looking down at those square fingers deftly unbuttoning his shirt.

“ _You_. Entering a _church_ ,” he says quietly, forcefully.

“No _choice_ ,” Crowley forces back, just as quiet, catching the way those fingers stutter over the top button.

“You had a choice,” Aziraphale is whispering, as if the lights in the room are watching them, on stage, _now you see it_.

“I _didn’t_ ,” Crowley presses, the air shallow in his lungs.

There is something to the way that their shared breath is combining in this room, mixing with the humidity of bathwater. Something transformative, _hot_.

“I won’t let you get shot,” Crowley says, and then quieter, “not again.”

Aziraphale’s hands pause amidst the buttons, nearly down to the last one. And then those color-shift eyes look up into his, their faces so very close together, that familiar spark arcing between their shared airspace, some magnetic pull of their lips.

 _Space rock_ , Crowley thinks, his heartbeat rocking him back and forth with the strength of its rhythm.

And then Aziraphale pulls his eyes away, finishes the last button, Faraday’s law closing. _Now you don’t_.

He can breathe again, the air still humid but not quite as solid as it had been a moment ago.

He can see Aziraphale swallow as he pulls off the shirt, can see the way his eyes catch on the lightning marks of white scars across his skin— a bullet hole here, the cauterization scar there, the asymmetrical imprint a bit of barbed wire had left at some point that he had barely noticed.

He wishes the lights were off.

“You’ll need to keep your feet out,” Aziraphale is saying, ignoring, as he often does, the previous conversation and its intensity, “hang them over the edge.”

“That sounds difficult.”

Aziraphale’s hands are at the zipper of his fly, pulling it down with the uniformed precision of someone who has removed thousands of articles of clothing from much more wounded men than he.

“I’ll show you what I mean,” he says, and threads those trousers down and off his feet.

He isn’t sure he will ever get used to it— the way Aziraphale can move him like he weighs little more than that bag of old books, the way he can pluck him from the earth like a weed, stick him in a vase of water, see how long he lasts.

He glances to the light switch and it slides itself down, off, blanketing them in darkness.

“Oh,” Aziraphale says, his head swiveling around to stare at the switch, “did you do that?”

“Sorry,” he starts, trying to form words in his mouth, “six years,” he says, by way of explanation.

Six years since they have been together, six years since Aziraphale has seen him, touched his skin. The familiarity of intimacy burns off, it seems, boils down.

His skin prickles where it meets the air. Or perhaps it is just that church dust, settling down into skin without fabric in the way.

“Six years,” Aziraphale says too, and together they remove the last of his clothing.

“I should’ve told you,” Crowley says quietly. “I don’t know why I didn’t.”

“I should have too,” Aziraphale says, and something in the way he lifts him— those arms under his knees, under his shoulders— reconstitutes a bit of that boiled down intimacy, deglazes the burnt bits.

“Like this,” he says, and perches him on that porcelain edge, “hands here,” and guides one across the span of hot water, “now down.”

Feet out, ankles in Aziraphale’s steady hands, in the dark. Now down under the hot water, knees hooked over the edges.

“That wasn’t so bad,” Crowley says. “Easier than I thought.”

Aziraphale is feeling along the sink in the dark for what Crowley assumes is one of the many bars of soap perched there.

“To your right,” he says, watching him.

“Thanks,” Aziraphale breathes, handing one out to him. “Now scrub.”

“What?”

“ _Scrub_ ,” he says again, insistent, and sinks to his knees next to him.

There are a pair of hands on his arm, pulling it up out of the water, probably getting the edges of his shirt wet.

Those hands are rubbing that bar of soap into his skin, perhaps a bit more roughly than necessary.

He watches him from beneath his eyelashes, across the span of darkness, can see how Aziraphale closes his eyes and rubs the soap along every inch of him, the way he blinks them open again, holds his breath.

“Angel,” he reaches over and stills the furious scrubbing.

“What?” Aziraphale says, blinking up into his face.

“What are you doing?” He asks quietly.

“I just—“ he inhales unsteadily, eyes darting away in the dark, “I want to get the church off of you.”

 _Water_ , Crowley thinks, _holy water_.

“I did it for you,” Crowley whispers, as those hands start scrubbing at him again, along his shoulder, his neck, the basin of his collarbones.

The motion stops, restarts.

“After I stopped that bit of book burning and cleared out the libraries. Took all the first editions.”

It had taken months, maybe a full year— up all night digging through libraries and bookshops, removing any important book he could find and shipping them off here. There is a pallet of them downstairs, he knows, still lovingly wrapped, hidden beneath the stairs.

“I knew that they’d come after you.”

It is so much easier to talk in the dark— with the lights off and the curtain closed. The woman in the box perhaps finding an opening, letting her head hang out. The audience long since gone home. 

“That they’d want your books.”

He is whispering and it gets lost in the sound of soap on his skin, Aziraphale scrubbing up under his jaw, tilting his face and washing along the bones of his cheeks, the orbital ridge.

“I had to try and stop them,” he closes his eyes and lets Aziraphale wipe smooth fingers along his forehead, tilt his head back and pour water from a pitcher down his hair, across his spine.

“I tried to lead them away. Maybe give them enough occult knowledge to convince them they didn’t need the books.”

It is remarkably difficult to stop talking. The dam lifted.

“But they’re fucking awful. They just want and want and want everything. Nothing is ever enough for them.”

He gasps as Aziraphale’s fingers dip into his ears, rub soap into the cropped hair.

“So I had to figure out when they were coming for you— and Greta. Fucking Greta. I overheard her talking about this bookseller she had found. In London. How he had all these rare titles that _no one_ had. How she convinced him that she was part of British intelligence.”

The rhythm of those fingers stop for a moment, stutter.

“Do you know?” He whispers, and lets Aziraphale tilt his head back again, fingers strong under his jaw. “Do you know how _fucking_ hard it was to not incinerate her?” He swallows and there is that lump in his throat again, that remembered violence.

“I had to just go along with it. Pretend I didn’t hear it. Mastermen would have skinned me alive. Hell would have too.”

There is a small noise in Aziraphale’s throat, perhaps there is a lump there too. 

“Why Anthony?”

Aziraphale has not spoken for what seems like hours.

“I needed a first name,” Crowley says, opening his eyes to find Aziraphale’s in the dark, “they asked for a name and I had that terrible nursery rhyme in my head at the time.”

“Nursery rhyme?”

“You know, the one about the frog.”

Aziraphale is blinking at him across the darkness.

“You must be joking.”

He can feel his cheeks flush.

“I never said I was good at improv.”

“Must’ve been tough to be a spy then.”

There is something like a smile on Aziraphale’s mouth, a small one.

“You’d be amazed what dark glasses do for an air of mystery. Nazis are all about aesthetics.”

“Give me your other arm,” Aziraphale just says, scrubbing again.

He works at the fingernails first, running his thumbnail underneath, around the cuticles, removing any bit of church.

“I like the way you say it,” Crowley whispers.

He is rubbing at his forearm, the elbow, the indent near the bone.

“Say what?”

Crowley watches as he reaches up to his other shoulder, down along his chest, over his heart.

“My name.”

Aziraphale stops, finds his eyes.

There are heartbeats and entire oceans of time between them— stretched out, stretched thin. How many times have they been in this bathroom? How many times have they so carefully not said the things that they are feeling? Not put a name to this incalculable attraction that pulses between them? Whether it is love or not love, Crowley does not care. He will take whatever bit of leftover crumb Aziraphale leaves for him, will take the stale remnants of temptations he does not intend to perform.

“I think we should get you out,” Aziraphale says, and there’s heat there, even in the dark.

“Yes,” Crowley breathes, his heart still too loud in his chest, “I think we should.”

* * *

“Do they hurt?”

Aziraphale has stacked pillows underneath his calves, elevating his feet up into the air.

“Angel, this is ridiculous.”

“ _Do they hurt_?” He asks again, fussing with the height.

“ _No_ ,” Crowley sighs, leaning back against the headboard, “Not at all.”

“They look terrible,” Aziraphale says.

“Then don’t look at them.”

Aziraphale is sitting next to his hips, his hands squeezing in his lap. He wants to fuss with something, Crowley can tell. Wants to do something other than face this moment, something other than move forward.

Aziraphale is good at being still, at being _slow_. He moves through time like an unchanging planet, a steady constant that has been here for a millennia and would remain here for a few million more.

“Tell me about here,” Crowley says, “about London. While I was gone.”

Aziraphale looks at him, lying on his bed with a towel around his waist, a blanket hitched up around his shoulders.

“There was a fire,” he says quietly, “the biggest one since 1666.”

There is something small about how he looks here, outlined by the city outside his window, the searchlights still scanning the lightening sky.

“I helped out with the hospitals again.”

He hates burns. Crowley knows he does, can tell by the way he talks about flamethrowers, by the way he fusses now over his burnt feet. And maybe he’s reading too much into it, maybe it isn’t this at all— but Crowley likes to think that at least a small part of it has to do with _him_ , has to do with his free-fall into boiling sulphur.

“They opened up the draft and—“

Aziraphale’s voice hitches in his throat, gets caught there.

“The boys signing up— _men_ ,” he corrects himself, “they look so young. It just reminds me of— of…”

“I know,” Crowley says, and finds his hand there in his lap, “it’s like before. All over again.”

History repeating, he thinks. And he wants to speed ahead— move along. Go faster along the tracks of time until they are at some place where this won’t keep repeating indefinitely. Where this war that is so much like the last one is gone and behind them and maybe there— in that bright and hopeful future, they will be able to speak the same language, kiss on the sidewalk like humans do. Pull the curtain back. Reveal the whole damned trick to the entire damned audience.

“I should have been here,” Crowley is saying.

“No,” Aziraphale says, looking down at their hands together on the bed, “you had work to do.”

“I missed you.”

He says it without realizing it, without really meaning to. Doesn’t matter. Do it anyway. Get nothing back.

He knows how this will go. He knows how Aziraphale will pull back now, how he will stuff a hand over his mouth, maybe look up towards the ceiling. Shuffle them off to do something benign together, something safe that does not include the discussion of things like emotion, of things like what exactly they are and what exactly they do together.

But Aziraphale doesn’t pull back, not this time, their hands still jumbled together at the fingers, the knuckles twisted. Now you see it.

And then he’s pulling that hand back to untwist their knots, only to reach it forward again— to reach forward and yank that towel open, lay him out naked.

“ _Angel_ ,” he says, shocked into near stillness.

Aziraphale says nothing, _nothing_ , just pushes his thigh down and out of the way, hands reaching desperately for his skin, smoothing between the valley of his hipbones. He is leaning over him, pressing kisses into that old entry wound at his hip, into the junction of thigh and torso, up beneath his navel.

The air is so thick with humidity and want that it is hard to pull into his lungs, hard to sate the greedy pounding of his heart, the suction of veins, a pulse that is furious with desire.

 _Don’t_ , he thinks, and closes his eyes, squeezes his hands into fists. He tries to imagine that he is not tempting Aziraphale to do anything that he doesn’t want to do on his own, tries to understand that nudity itself, even his, is not inherently immoral.

He is hard already, even with Aziraphale fully clothed— those pale trousers tenting up around the heat of his own desire. And it’s enough, _again_ , to just have that— to just know that Aziraphale wants him in some capacity, even if it’s just for sex. He can live with that. He can survive that.

 _What a cross to bear_ , he thinks, as Aziraphale’s mouth presses hot kisses into his skin, _how ever will I survive this._

“I missed you so _fucking_ much,” he can hear himself saying it and doesn’t know where the words come from— not from his brain and not from his throat. They pull up from someplace deeper, somewhere in the center of him, somewhere underneath the bone. His own words hit him like a bullet to the chest— stopping time, restarting it again— an admission that fills his veins with some familiar electric heat. Fear and adrenaline in equal pulsing measures.

“I used to think of you every night,” he says, and Aziraphale is saying nothing and saying everything all at once, pressing his face against his skin, pushing kisses into his cock.

“I used to look out across the city at night and— and— there was a church there.”

He is in Aziraphale’s hand and it is better— _so_ much better than how he had remembered it, how he tried to imitate it.

“Do you even know,” he gasps, and Aziraphale’s mouth is lathing kisses into the tip of him, tongue darting out to gather the salt of him, “what it’s _like_ —“

The sentence gets bitten off by the animal sound that rips out around it, that neat mouth closing around him, sucking him down.

“—to,” he gasps again, back arching, head pressed back into those pillows, that awful tartan pattern, “—to jerk off looking at a _church_?”

There is something like a laugh in Aziraphale’s throat, vibrating against him and he can not help the disbelieving sounds that are coming out of his mouth, the flex of his fingers suddenly in Aziraphale’s hair, on his shoulder.

There’s movement there on the bed, between Aziraphale’s clothed legs, a hand tugging at his pants.

“Oh _fuck_ , angel— are you— are _you_?”

It is unmistakeable— the angel’s hand is there around his own cock, pulled through the fly of his pants, moving up and down.

“Holy _fuck_. Oh, shit. Oh fuck. You’re really doing it aren’t you?”

Aziraphale pulls his mouth away to pin him with a frustrated glare, something flat and dangerous in his eyes.

“Crowley,” he breathes, his lips swollen, “stop talking.”

“ _Fuck_ , yes,” he moans, head falling back, “tell me what to do.”

Aziraphale presses a kiss to the tip of him, sucks against the slit and the pearls of liquid beading there.

“That was not a suggestion.”

Crowley opens his eyes to stare sightlessly at that ceiling, at those searchlights out across the city.

 _Home_ , he thinks, and remembers Aziraphale asking for him to say it, again, say it— _home_. _I’m home_.

“Oh fuck, angel,” his mouth is so dry and he is panting into that humid room, Aziraphale pulling pleasure up through his bones, from some reservoir that he thought he had depleted. So many nights fucking his own fist, trying to hold onto memories that slid like desert sand through his fingers.

“I’m so close,” he says, squeezing his eyes shut, “is it okay? Please. Tell me it’s okay.”

The mouth pulls back, kisses at the slit, follows along the vein on his underside.

“It’s okay,” he whispers against the wet skin, and takes him back in his mouth.

 _I love you_ , he wants to say, and bites his tongue until it bleeds. _It hurts me. I love you. Please know this._

He tries not to squeeze too tight— tries not to fist those white curls too hard or dig his fingers into that strong shoulder, tries not to rip the seams of Aziraphale’s beloved clothes. There is a silent moment of completeness, every muscle squeezing tight, and then heat against the outside of his thigh, Aziraphale choking down the whimpered sounds of his own release around Crowley in his mouth.

He opens his eyes again and can taste the iron salt of blood in his mouth, on his incisors.

“Thank you,” he says, to that ceiling, to those pillows, to anything that will listen.

Aziraphale presses his forehead against Crowley’s thigh, breathes in, breathes out, clears his throat.

“Would you like some tea?” He asks, apropos of nothing.

Now you don’t.

There is a twist of something a lot like pain in his chest, at the banality of it all. But he is used to it by now. He comes to expect it— put the rabbit back in the hat, hide it behind the curtain, push that woman back in her box. 

“Sure,” he says around the tightness in his throat, the strange prickling feeling in the corner of his eyes, “that’d be lovely.”

“Okay,” Aziraphale is saying, the musicality of his voice a bit dampened, his throat sore perhaps from swallowing so much Crowley, “I’ll be back in a moment.

There is a bit of Aziraphale on the outside of his thigh, his hip. Crowley reaches a finger down, pulls the shine of it across his skin, lifts it to his lips.

It is salt and sunshine in his mouth, marrying the blood there. Magic ritual. Blood and soil.

He closes his eyes again, exhales into the empty room.

There is the promise of dawn along the skyline, maybe not for a few hours yet, the sky blushing the faintest bit pink.

The curtain is going to open again soon, the audience back in their seats. He will crawl back into the box. Get bisected at the hips.

He looks down at the stretch of his body on the bed. The spent cock, the unspent heart. Maybe he already has been.

Aziraphale is coming back up the stairs with tea cups in his hands. He can smell the hot liquid, the oxidized _Camellia sinensis._

He covers up his lower half, rearranges his ankles to the proper elevated height Aziraphale had decided upon, smoothes the mask back on his face.

Blink and you’ll miss it.

It’s there in the palming, the passing of pots of tea.

Now you see it— Aziraphale’s fingers graze his as he hands over the tea cup, pull back as he gives it away.

Now you don’t.


	2. an aeolian process

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _For you are dust and to dust you shall return._
> 
> Those clouds in the distance look like end times and he closes his eyes.
> 
> _It’s not. Not quite. Not yet. Slow down._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in case you wanted to know why they didn't talk for six years.

Llano Estacado 1933

The earth here is dead.

He had been here once, long ago. To the great flat torso of America. And then beyond it— to that promised land along the coast. He had been here when men had blasted open the earth and searched her ichor for flecks of gold, those forgotten bits of star hearts.

They had destroyed her then and they are destroying her now— he is sure of it— with their plants that do not want to live here, their pumping down of the rivers to water those plants that don’t want to live here. They have ripped up most of the prairie grass by the roots, tilled it away. There is just the hairless trunk of raw earth underneath of it and nothing to hold it down. Nothing but sand. All dust.

The earth is _flat_ here. Flatter than he has ever experienced— flatter somehow still than those great deserts across the ocean. At least those have peaks, have valleys, undulating dunes like the rhythm of the sea.

But Llano Estacado is an almost mathematically perfect anomaly of flatness. There is nothing here for the wind to divert into. Nothing for it to exhaust itself against. No other element to balance it out. 

It rips across the land like how it rips across the ocean in those furthest stretches between land— licking up a swell with the magnitude of its fetch.

It licks up a swell here too— in the distance there are great growing clouds. Not of water vapor promising of rain— but dust, sand, _death_.

 _Cursed is the ground because of you_ , he thinks, the Book of Genesis always there in the back of his throat. His birth certificate.

_Is this is what The Almighty meant?_

He walks along the edge of a drying riverbed, looks down upon the muddy water, wonders why any human would find the place that had previously been called _The Great American Desert_ to be suitable for farmland.

A wind walks down the long stretch of prairie, licks up the legs of his trousers.

A mission for water. A mission to bless the riverbeds, fill the aquifer. He is here for that but it does not seem like enough. It does not seem like that will be enough to water these fields, to put back the prairie grass that has lived here for a millennia.

And he knows its all connected— absolutely all of it. Everything is a tiny tile that is knocked over by the tile behind it. The Great War had demanded nitrogen stores to be used for explosives instead of fertilizer— so food stores are low. Food stores are low and that demands more farmland— so humans have ripped up the earth and planted where nothing will grow. Humans planting where nothing will grow is irrevocably altering the earth as she is meant to be— a thing that nearly without fault precedes disaster. Something terrible is about to come. He knows it. He can feel it.

 _For you are dust and to dust you shall return_.

Those clouds in the distance look like end times and he closes his eyes.

 _It’s not. Not quite. Not yet_. _Slow down._

There is the parched silhouette of a farmhouse in the distance, its windmill rotating lazily in the mid-day sun, and he makes his way toward it. Knowing that something terrible is coming, yes, but he can make it so that at least these people may have clean water, at least they may survive whatever is about to arrive on their doorstep. This time at least. For now.

 _If only we could all be so lucky_.

* * *

It is full on dark when he leaves down that bit of dusty road and out into the ocean of flat prairie. There is no moon, not this time, but the tapestry of stars above him makes up for its absence.

The sky here is _huge_ — stretching impossibly in every direction. He has not seen this many stars in a long time, not with the invention of electrical lighting dimming their brightness, polluting the skies with their ever-long incandescence.

And he misses it, somehow— the long nights lit by candles and fire and nothing else. Those days _before._ The days before automobiles started going so fast— like Crowley in that black car he had purchased back in London, whipping around city streets that still smacked underneath horse-hooves. It is all too fast, _too much_. End days are coming and the world keeps barreling towards them without care, without thought.

 _Am I the only one who notices_?

He inhales, exhales, stares down at his dusty shoes. Closes his eyes. Feels all at once alone. 

When he opens them again there is a figure in front of him, just at the crossroad, perhaps a furlong away.

He blinks and tries to let his eyes adjust to the darkness, bring in more of that starlight.

Even without Crowley’s ability to see in the dark he knows who it is. He would know the cut of those sharp shoulders anywhere, the utter lack of hip. He should have guessed that he’d come, like he always did, at the barest hint of Aziraphale’s unease.

 _At a crossroad at mid-night_.

His heart has decided on a frenetic number of beats-per-minute and is sticking to it like a metronome, pulsing somewhere in his throat. He swallows and drinks down some air and starts walking again, every footfall feeling like the first (like when he stepped into Eden and first felt the earth), every brush of air against his palms feeling new (like when his wing had brushed Crowley’s shoulder, there on the garden wall), every breath burning his throat (like the first time he had said Crowley’s name).

Crowley’s eyes are hidden underneath those round dark glasses and Aziraphale hates them, _hates them_ , for covering up what is surely the mother-of-pearl shine of them, the predatory glow.

He feels _shaped_ , molded inexorably against his will. Wind against stone. Carving out curves of him. _When did this happen_? He wonders, _was it Eden or was it earlier? Was it ten years ago or twenty?_

Crowley is tall and dark and looks constructed wholly out of it. Like he has been painted by night. His hair here too is dark, his eyes covered, his skin carefully concealed under a dark suit, a high collar.

But shine a light on him, he knows, and the brilliance of Crowley will reflect it blindingly, like a moon reflecting the sun.

He just needs a bit of light.

“Hallo, angel,” is that familiar voice— maybe the _first_ voice that he can remember hearing in this corporation. The first one pushed out of a human throat.

“Hello, Crowley,” he says, and it is with the air swept out of his lungs.

“Back in America again, huh?” Crowley says, and Aziraphale can see that his hair has been shaved near down to the scalp just above his ear, up to the hard part in line with his eyebrow.

“Water,” he croaks out, “there’s been a bit of a drought here.”

“I think it’s a few shades more than just _a bit_ ,” Crowley says, looking out across those parched fields, behind him to the bare earth ripped clean of prairie grass.

That scar above his ear shines silver in the starlight.

“Something bad is coming,” Aziraphale says, still two paces from Crowley but somehow feeling the magnetic heat of him, “I don’t know what it is but I can feel it.”

There is the stilted movement of Crowley reaching out, as if to take his hand, and then he pulls it back, swallows.

“I know— I felt you—,” he starts, stops, starts again, “something seemed off,” he decides on.

 _You can feel me?_ Aziraphale wonders dizzily, curious, not for the first time, what the link is between them— what it is that tethers them to each other.

“Is that why you came here?”

He can see Crowley tonguing his teeth, knows by now that he does it when he’s been found out. But it’s transparent, it always is, how Crowley has managed to find him across centuries and across countries, _continents_ , with little more than his own mind, his own skin.

“Something like that,” he settles on, “are you okay?”

Aziraphale looks out across that expanse of dry desert, out to the edge of horizon.

“Oh,” Aziraphale says, and worries at his lip, “you know me. Just worried.”

“Walk with me,” Crowley says, and holds out his hand.

Aziraphale looks at it, looks around. There is no one here but he feels naked at the suggestion of holding hands. They’ve done it before— of course— perhaps hundreds of times. But in basements, in alleyways, after sex. They do it while holding each other in their mouths and again in their opposing hands. They do not do it while walking.

He swallows and steps forward, slips his palm against Crowley’s. It closes on his softly and it feels like coming home.

Their strides match, perfectly, even with the ungainly length of Crowley— all leg— and Aziraphale’s considerably shorter ones. He watches the synchronized step of their gates in mystified wonder, considering not for the first time that they are different, yes, but also unerringly similar. 

He takes him out into that desert, somewhere off of the road and amongst the scrub brush, the dotted plots of prairie grass.

“It will be okay,” Crowley is saying, but Aziraphale is having trouble hearing him over the weight of their palms pressed together, “I know bad things are coming but they will eventually be okay. The earth will come back. She always does.”

It sounds a bit like he is trying to convince himself of those things, and Aziraphale remembers that time in Kobarid, that panic over a bread line, over wheat fields under water.

Crowley has always loved plants, loved _green_. Perhaps it has something to do with him being a serpent, Aziraphale thinks— his belly always pressed against the ground and the grass there, something about using his entire body to climb an apple tree, having to embrace it to climb it. Snakes _have_ to love the earth, _have_ to love plants, _have_ to love trees. They are constantly pressing against those things, clutching them to their chests. They move hearing their own heartbeat in the earth underneath.

“I hope so,” Aziraphale says, and they stop somewhere in that field.

That hand wrapped around his squeezes and lets go, digs instead into a pocket.

“Perhaps,” Aziraphale starts, inhaling deep, “perhaps it’s best that I’m here for a while.”

Crowley is looking at him sidelong through his glasses, he can tell. He can see that sharp edge of jaw flex.

“Are they?” Aziraphale asks, a lump suddenly in his throat, “are they still? The Nazis?”

The jaw flexes again, the long throat works.

“Yes.”

It’s a bit like a dart in his heart— to hear it. To hear him say it so plainly.

“When I get back I’ll dig through the libraries and bookshops,” Crowley says, and the dart in his heart twists but not in a painful way, “pull out any important first editions. Any historical ones.”

He can feel his pupils dilate under the starlight, under the beauty of Crowley speaking.

“You will?” He whispers.

“I will.”

Those broad shoulders hitch up and those hands dig into those pockets.

“I’ll send them to you. To the bookshop. If that’s okay.”

Aziraphale can feel his teeth vibrating, his jaw quivering. There is some strange uncomfortable sensation in the ducts of his eyes, _tears_ , and he is all at once beholden to an emotion that rips through him like fire.

“Yes,” he manages, swallowing and blinking frantically, “yes that would be wonderful.”

“Okay,” Crowley breathes, and Aziraphale can see his chest moving too, under something more than just the strain of the walk here, the thin desert air.

Crowley is digging around in his pocket suddenly, in those trousers that are too tight. He pulls out a carton of cigarettes and selects one with his teeth, the shine of them sharp under the light of so many stars.

He holds out the box to Aziraphale but he shakes his head, _no_ , and watches Crowley light it with a bit of flame jumping from his thumb.

He has all at once an urging desire to _know_ — know _anything_ — anything different. Something new. He wants to unravel the mysteries between them, understand how Crowley still manages to surprise him, even after all these centuries. Understand how Crowley could be a demon but still save books, those bits of knowledge, rescue them from their shelves.

“Tell me something,” Aziraphale says with difficulty, “anything.”

Understand why Crowley can summon fire and Aziraphale had been issued a sword that flamed with it.

Crowley looks down at the lit end of his cigarette and then up to the stars, the massive stretch of sky.

“Did you know that I helped build them?”

Aziraphale looks over at him, standing like a pylon underneath that great glittering carpet.

“Build what?” He asks.

He is looking down at the lit end again with something like curious detachment.

“The stars.”

Aziraphale studies him sharply, “you did?”

Crowley is staring up at them then, eyes more gold and more human than he has ever seen before.

“I did,” he says softly.

He wants to ask if he misses it, how much he remembers, if there are any particularly meaningful constellations.

But Crowley looks small here, less dangerous than ever, more fragile. Like the mention of that time before the fall might break him in half, might drag him screaming back.

He is inhaling again and then offering Aziraphale the cigarette, finding his eyes in the starlight.

“Did you?” He is asking, exhaling smoke into the night sky, “help build anything?”

Aziraphale takes the cigarette, takes a pull. Then hands it back, suddenly feeling very small himself.

“No,” he exhales, “I… I didn’t,” he tries on a smile, gives a small insincere laugh, “wasn’t much involved in the whole…” he wiggles his fingers a bit, “creation bit.”

He isn’t sure how Crowley manages to do it— that look that makes him feel like he is seeing through him to his bones, an x-ray.

He takes another long drag of cigarette and holds it in for a stretch, releases it out to the ocean of prairie grass.

“Don’t say that like it’s a bad thing,” he says, “like you missed out.”

“Well, I— I _did_. A bit.”

“Aziraphale, you’re a _principality_. She chose you specifically to watch over humanity, the things that She loves more than anything.”

Crowley bites off the end of his sentence and Aziraphale can hear what he isn’t saying there as if he has— as if the words are drawn on his forehead, written in the dust— _more than she loved me_.

 _I will love you enough to make up for it_ , he thinks, and the thought shocks him, pulls the hair on the back of his neck to stand up.

“You did not miss out,” he finishes, and scuffs his foot through the dirt.

Aziraphale turns his eyes skyward and finds _Ursa Minor_ , finds _Polaris_. He wonders if Crowley knew he was helping to build a star that would lead humans, a star that they could use to find their way home.

“I miss them,” Crowley says, not without difficulty, and pulls his glasses off.

His eyes are gold, like those star-hearts, even in the dim light, even with that pupil of infinite black blown wide in the night.

“You miss them?”

Aziraphale does not miss the long tilt of his jaw as he lifts it skyward, the stuttering swallow.

“Creating things, protecting them. Having a hand in the way things are shaped.”

There is something about the way he says it— the way his eyes look under this dark sky. The profile has not changed, the aquiline nose is still proud. And Aziraphale has a distinct and perfect memory of a desert stretch not so dissimilar to this one— one filled with children and humans and pairs of animals, two-by-two— a perfect memory of Crowley’s long hair with childlike braids tucked into it.

 _You’d be a wonderful father,_ Aziraphale thinks, dizzy and drunk on star light and Crowley’s magnetic pull, his swell of love that coats him like a dusting of snow.

“You do,” Aziraphale manages, breathing in that effusive emotion and trying to pull oxygen out of it, “have a hand in the way things are shaped.”

And he knows it because Crowley has shaped him, inexorably, _slowly_ , but still shaped him. Like wind across stone. Wind may be free and fast moving but it is persistent, Aziraphale thinks, and the stone it moves against will eventually yield to the brush of the wind’s hand. Every time. Always.

Like how he had yielded to Crowley’s push for friendship, for the Arrangement, for another bite of bread. Crowley always pushing the basket of it across the table to him— _eat_.

“Yeah,” he barks out, then sucks on that cigarette again, “I got humans kicked out of the garden. That shaped things.”

“You gave them knowledge,” Aziraphale says gently.

“I gave them _shame_.”

“Do you regret it?”

Crowley turns to him and offers up the cigarette, incinerates it into ash when Aziraphale denies it, “never. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

Aziraphale’s heart is too loud, too _much_. _Shh_ , he thinks, _I am trying to hear him_.

“You love them, don’t you?”

“The humans?”

“Yes.”

Crowley looks down at his feet, pauses.

“Yes,” he says, looking at Aziraphale across the darkness, and they are suddenly not talking about humans anymore, he knows, _“too much_.”

It happens before he knows it. It happens somewhere at the moment those words reach his ears. Those words that are clearly not saying _too much_ about humans. Those words that are clearly saying _too much_ about Aziraphale.

He has a hand in Crowley’s collar, up by his throat and pulls him against him, pressing their chests together, those flat torsos. And then Crowley is turning him around urgently— crushing his back up against his chest and nuzzling that nose into the nape of his neck, breathing against the grass of his hair.

“ _Too much_ ,” he says again, in his ear, and tugs him down to that dusty desert floor, the prairie plants undulating around them like the ocean, like water.

There is a hand at his fly before he knows it, kisses pressed along the stoney bumps of his spine. Crowley’s legs cradle his hips, an arm wrapped somewhere around his chest.

“Too _fucking much_ , angel.”

It’s quick, it always is, when Crowley does it. Too quick. Always over _too soon_.

Aziraphale fumbles, presses his hand over Crowley’s under his clothes, slows it down.

“Slow,” he breathes, “ _please_.” _Make this last. Let’s stay here._

There is a forehead pressed into the junction of shoulder and neck, Crowley’s arm around his belly gripping with a desperate strength. And he doesn’t miss the way they fit together, the way he fills in where Crowley lacks, the way Crowley has what Aziraphale doesn’t.

Wind shaping rock, filling in the negative space.

He can feel Crowley rocking up against his back, rutting there mindlessly through his clothes, lathing at the skin under his lips with what Aziraphale is sure is a steadily forking tongue.

“Too much,” Crowley is gasping, “ _so_ much.”

There is an aquifer underneath of them, far below. Aziraphale can feel the pulses of its water there, the imagined movement of liquid. He came here to bless it. He came here to fill the riverbeds.

He squeezes his eyes shut and rocks up into Crowley’s hand, backward against his hips.

He can feel the weight of the stars washing down on him, can feel the gold of their hearts somewhere in those eyes that are next to his neck.

“ _Slow_ ,” he says again, “oh, darling. Slower please.”

There’s something like a whine pressed into his skin, a mouth sucking urgent kisses there.

“But I’m close,” Crowley bites out, “so close. I _can’t_.”

But the hand around him doesn’t speed up— despite the ever more frantic press of hips into his spine.

“That’s good,” Aziraphale breathes, and opens his eyes up to that great night sky, picking out the constellations that he has seen written on Crowley’s skin, the imprints of his children, “that’s okay.”

He reaches behind him, that awkward angle, wedges a hand between their bodies to give Crowley something more substantial to rub against.

“Oh _fuck_ , so close. _Angel_.”

“Me too,” Aziraphale gasps, feeling that familiar upwelling in his veins, his heart, the aquifer somewhere below them filling too. Miracles dripping out of his fingertips as they dig into the earth underneath them.

This isn’t what they had in mind, he knows, when they told him to bless the riverbeds. When they told him to fill the aquifer.

This lonesome desert. This empty sky. He is complete here with Crowley behind him.

 _Get thee behind me, satan_ , and he gasps out a breathless laugh as he thinks it, closes his eyes at the height of his blasphemy.

He knows there’s a plan to everything, even this— and the Almighty would not let this happen, She would smite them down in a moment, if it were not meant to be.

Crowley is coming behind him, gasping and cursing his way through it. Profanities etched into the skin at his neck. Aziraphale follows after him, his head tilting back, breathless underneath that night sky that Crowley had helped make, breathless underneath Crowley’s hand, painting it white.

_Wouldn’t She?_

There is a cresting wave of regret as his orgasm ebbs away, a creeping doubt of what they just did underneath an empty sky perhaps with God Herself watching. He is grateful at least that they kept their clothes on, that perhaps from far enough away it would look like two people sitting in an empty field.

 _Rutting against each other like animals_ , he thinks, and closes his eyes.

He can feel panic setting in under his clothes, on top of his skin, pushing up from somewhere in his bones.

“Wha’s wrong?” Is Crowley’s sleepy voice behind him, that forehead still pressed against the stones of his vertebrae.

“Crowley, _oh,_ ” he is breathing very quickly, his heart beat too loud in his ears, “I do not think we should have done that.”

The jerk of Crowley away from him is instant, leaves a distinct chill against his skin.

“Sorry. _Fuck_ ,” he is pushing himself back, across that desert floor, kicking up small mountains of dust, “ _shit_. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean— I shouldn’t have—“

Why is it suddenly so hard to breathe? It feels like he has suddenly gained in altitude, like the air is suddenly much thinner.

“There’s no one here,” Crowley is saying, somewhere over his shoulder, “we’re totally alone.”

Aziraphale’s ears are burning. He isn’t sure what to do— start pleading in Latin or perhaps try not to gain Her attention at all.

“Hey,” there is the barest touch of a hand on his shoulder and he flinches underneath of it, “this was my fault. I take the blame.”

 _But I was the one who grabbed you_.

He can feel himself nodding despite himself.

“It’s on _me_ , okay?”

He keeps right on nodding, his eyes still closed. It feels good, at least, to let some of that blame shift, to not carry the full brunt of their burden.

 _But I would be the one to answer to Her_.

“We’ll be more careful next time,” and something in the way Crowley says it sounds like a plea— like he is actually saying, _please let there be a next time_.

Aziraphale nods again and opens his eyes, find _Ursa Minor,_ finds _Polaris_.

“Like sleight of hand, remember? Come on, angel, show me a magic trick.”

His breathing is evening out, the lack of response from the sky somehow thrilling and aching in all its vacancy. A child without a parent. No supervision.

He tries on a smile, attempts to swallow.

Crowley is crouching somewhere next to him, an arm’s length away, as if he is talking to a wild animal, some skittish creature.

Aziraphale looks over at him, at his naked eyes there— illuminated the barest gold with reflected starlight. The pride of his children. Perhaps reflecting a bit of Aziraphale’s light too— the shine of it off his hair, his skin.

And then he reaches over, snaps his fingers somewhere behind Crowley’s ear— pulls down a real miracle— and hands Crowley the manifested pair of sunglasses.

He licks his lips, watches Crowley’s eyes as he stares down at them in his palm.

“Ta-da,” Aziraphale says, and tries very hard to smile.

Crowley takes them, and slides them on, and stands suddenly upright.

“I have to get back,” he’s saying, “are you okay?”

Aziraphale lets himself sit there in the dirt, in the sea of prairie grass.

“I’m fine,” he says, “I’ll be fine.”

 _I can take care of myself. Just don’t draw any attention to yourself, please_. 

“Okay. I’ll go now. I’m sorry.”

There is the smell of a candle extinguishing, perhaps a match being struck, and then the curious vacancy of being suddenly alone.

Aziraphale looks up at _Polaris_ , at that North Star— wonders if it is just his imagination that it suddenly looks dimmer, like _home_ has just gotten further away.

A brush of wind sweeps across the prairie, shimmering silver in the night, kicking up the dust of the bare fields behind him and carrying it across that impossible flatness.

 _For you are dust_ , he thinks, and stands, brushing it from his clothes, _and to dust you shall return_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aeolian processes pertain to wind activity in the study of geology and specifically to the wind's ability to shape the surface of the Earth. Lack of respect for these processes contributed greatly to the Dust Bowl in the 30s (starting in 1934) (along with drought, environmental hubris, etc etc). If anyone is interested in a really wonderful non-fiction book of this time period I highly recommend you check out _The Worst Hard Time_ by Timothy Egan. 


	3. Déjà Vous

London

June, 1943

“Isn’t it a bit… dangerous?” Aziraphale had asked.

“Oh, nah,” Crowley had told him, rubbing a finger along the edge of a drinking glass and sucking at his teeth, “they love me over there. You demonstrate your knowledge of the Younger Futhark one time and next thing you know you’re being brought in for guest lectures on runic lore.”

“But—“

“It’s fine, angel,” his finger had stopped rubbing the glass, “really. It is.”

Their kneecaps had been kissing for the entire conversation— two cups of coffee and one and a half scones later.

“What about the—“

Something in Crowley’s eyes had gone dark, shuttered. Aziraphale had not finished his sentence.

“I can’t do anything too… obvious. To help,” he had said, low under his breath, “head office would know.”

There had not been anyone watching that day, outside, on the sidewalk. But still Aziraphale had glanced around before sliding his hand palm up underneath the table, resting on top of his thigh.

It had taken a moment then for Crowley to catch the movement under the table, a solid handful of heartbeats. But he eventually had— and Aziraphale had marveled then at how adept he had become at reading the shift in his shoulders, how he could catch the slide of Aziraphale’s eyes and intuit exactly what that meant.

A palm had slid into his then, there under that table, there outside. Aziraphale had squeezed it.

“But pretty soon the Nazis will start engineering some U-boats with some truly terrible design flaws.”

There had been an attempt at a smile on his face then.

“Just be careful,” Aziraphale had said, “ _please_.”

* * *

_Five weeks later_

There is a clock on the wall and its hands are holding near midnight.

Aziraphale is staring at it there across his shop, his gaze fixed flat on the infinitesimal movement of its second hand. The bookshop silent save for the mechanical beating of its metal heart.

Something isn’t right.

He looks down at his wrists and can see the pulse underneath his skin, thrumming out a syncopated rhythm with the clock on the wall. It pulls at him. Feels hot.

He tries to sip at his chocolate. Tries to breathe in the pleasant stillness of night and nothing to do.

But there is the burnt air of charcoal in the back of his throat. A strange saline taste on the tip of his tongue. When he exhales he can taste dust and maybe heat too. The chocolate in his mouth turning to ash. Fire and salt.

He gets up, goes to the bookshop till.

There are a pair of glasses tucked there and he pulls them out, rubs a finger along the frame.

Crowley is fine, he tells himself. He’s fine and he’ll be back in London soon and then they can meet up again. Go to the park. Feed the ducks.

But there is a great tightness in his chest, a pit of worry in his stomach. His heart is beating much too loudly, much too quickly.

He isn’t exactly sure when it started happening— the imprints of a life he isn’t living showing up like ghosts on his doorstep. A phantom limb of echoed empathy. Half of his heart beating behind different ribs.

“What have you gotten yourself into?” He says to himself, to his books, to that clock on the wall.

Maybe he had always felt it. Maybe he just never had a name for it. Maybe that’s why he had watched a snake slither up that tree one day in Eden and did absolutely nothing about it. Maybe that’s why he knew what apples tasted like having never bitten one himself. Inherently understood its sweetness. Knew that it would be worth it. 

Crowley is in Hamburg, he knows, at the Blohm and Voss shipyard. Something about manufacturing defective submarine snorkels. He had received a telegram a couple weeks back from Germany, Crowley still using the outdated style of placing the word STOP between sentences.

_It makes a terrible vacuum STOP in the boat when they retrieve the periscope STOP deadly and hilarious STOP please get a phone STOP_

Perhaps he really should be getting a telephone.

They had, after all, made an agreement to make at least something of an effort to keep themselves abreast of each other’s plans. A decision molded out of six years of absence and perhaps their own self-interest in understanding the unspoken thread that linked them.

Aziraphale worries at his lip with his teeth, stares down at his pulse on his wrist. The ocean blue veins.

He could go for a moment. Pop over there. Check and see how things are getting on and then pop back. It’d only be a moment. Just a minute or two in the gravel of a shipyard. Maybe their fingers would brush as they walked. Maybe Crowley would take off his glasses. Aziraphale could look into the gold of his eyes.

He tucks the glasses back into their spot in the till, on top of that Mayfair address, the Western Union telegram folded underneath; stalks back to his chair.

He tries to take another sip of his chocolate but it tastes all together wrong in his mouth. Flavorless and dry.

He shoves the cup of it onto a table, tugs at his waistcoat. 

It is easy to disappear in the middle of a war. There is little in the way of explanation to the head office— little in the way of answering a question like, _why did you miracle yourself out to Germany in the middle of the night?_ The answer lying somewhere around, _someone asked for an angel in the midst of an air raid. What was I to do?_

If Michael would even bother asking in the first place.

Aziraphale closes his eyes and swallows around that strange burnt taste in his throat, tries to reach out and find that bit of thread that links him toCrowley. Imagine where he might be. 

Air raids, he thinks, and furrows his brow. The RAF has been performing air raids over Germany. Perhaps over Hamburg. Retribution for the blitz maybe. Taking out an important manufacturing city. He had read about it somewhere, on some paper dropped on his doorstep.

He has a sudden sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. A sudden uptick in his pulse. Aziraphale tongues the roof of his mouth, tasting ash, tasting fire. Oh. _Is that why—_

He is snapping his fingers before he realizes it— lifting himself away to someplace much hotter, much louder, much less still. Nearly a thousand kilometers of distance in less than the span of a second. Disappearing between the hands on that clock left behind in his shop.

He opens his eyes and finds himself in Hell. 

It must be. There is no other explanation. There is the marked stillness of a heart no longer beating, of his pulse ceasing, his eyes blown wide in shocked disbelief.

He looks down at his hand, at the fingers still curled around the motion of his miracle, looks back up at Hell.

He blinks against the wind and the heat, his heart restarting when he sees the twisted carapace of a familiar building.

He has been to Hamburg a dozen times maybe. Times before it was called Hamburg and times before there were roads, before buildings, before it had been built up. And times after— when it became a bustling city, an important sea-port.

But it’s gone now— _razed_. The charming brick buildings are scorched black and glowing, fired into husks of soulless architecture— the windows blown out, glass melting in the streets, a return to sand. There is an impossible firestorm of incomprehensible height beyond them, _through_ them— towering over the city, blanketing the horizon.

He can see the asphalt across the river bubbling up and popping beneath the oppressive magnitude of heat, of fire, _everywhere._

The river is on fire and the sky is on fire and there is a great whipping wind made of it torrenting through the exploding streets. Ripping up automobiles like they are autumn leaves caught in a breeze. Tearing the doors off of buildings and the roofs too.

There are no humans here— they are all gone maybe. Blown out. Extinguished beneath the tower of fire that is blazing over top the skyline. Many hundreds of meters tall.

This is Hell.

He is sure of it.

The inferno. Some perversion of the second and sixth layers. The both of them mashed together. The one for lust and the one for heresy. The lovers whipped endlessly by wind and the heretics flamed beneath tombstones of fire.

_Then the Lord rained fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah._

He chokes on the words of Genesis in his throat. He has seen this before— a long time ago— Crowley has too— and all at once he can hear his friend’s voice from that desert oasis, beneath those trees and those stars: _She turned an entire city into… into nothing. Salt. There were innocent people in there._

The air is so hot it scorches on the way down his throat and he endeavors not to breathe, his legs leading him down a stretch of road that has not yet bubbled under the immense heat.

_Entreat me not to leave thee_ — the words are a metronome to walk through fire to— _or to return from following after thee_.

The remains of the shipyard exterior loom black against the orange sky, a steadily twisting sheet of metal bulwark curling in on itself as the temperature rises.

There is no sound save for the furious whipping of wind down the streets, down the canals, licking up flames on anything that could be considered fuel.

He ducks inside the building, folding himself around the warping metal doors, careful not to touch it. The warehouse opens into a cavernous stomach, the skeleton of U-boats strung up on blocks and rollers at its center, standing on metal frameworks.

Flames are licking up the walls, the H beams at the center of the warehouse knocked loose by the blockbuster bombs until they collapsed on those half-built U-boats. There is just pile of heaped metal and wood riddling the interior. A scorched and crusted heart, half on fire and smoldering.

And he sees him— there— on that concrete bilge way, somewhere within that skeleton, leading down along the steady slope to the canals. There will be no removing of sunglasses, he realizes. There will be no brushing of fingers.

_For wither thou goest_.

He is all at once running and his heart is pounding and he can tell it’s him— he can tell by the black cut of his clothes on the concrete bilge way and the vermillion lick of his hair against that metal framework that is pressing him to the floor.

_You’re okay. You’re okay. You have to be okay_. 

But he’s not moving and his eyes are closed.

The concrete is hot, nearly melting— flames licking up the walls and licking up that metal too. He glances down at his bare palms, at the fire that is edging along the line of Crowley’s bare skin, up by his neck, across his chest, eating at his clothes.

He spares nearly a second, maybe less than an entire heartbeat— and then grabs at that metal framework across Crowley’s shoulder, hefts the entire weight of it until the lines on his palm melt into nothing. The head line blurring. The heart line too.

When he tosses it aside perhaps a bit of his skin goes with it. But drunk on adrenaline and fear, he feels nothing— curiously okay. His hands are burnt but they can still wedge underneath Crowley’s shoulders, beneath his knees— can still lift him in his arms and crush him against his chest.

What it is that has always been written, has always been true? _Don’t look back_.

Don’t look at the past. Don’t look at where you’ve been. Do not study the things you used to know.

Orpheus looked back. Lot’s wife looked back. Maybe those glances unlocked something in this world. Now there’s grief. Now there’s salt.

Crowley is light in his arms— somehow boneless and yet made entirely of out of them— all angles and edges. The long neck is lolling back and he shifts the black and tangled mass of him until that sharp cheek is angled into the cup of his shoulder and clavicle, until the wisps of his hellfire hair tickle against Aziraphale’s jaw.

Look only forward— look at the feet carrying you out of the place you used to know and into the place where you are meant to be.

Ignore the sublime temptation to glance back at the place that you might end up someday.

The place for the heretics. The place for lovers. The maelstrom of fire and wind; the beating, incessant future that awaits the angel equipped with the strength to vanquish the serpent of Eden. The strength that is carrying that serpent of Eden away from that taste of their future. Fire and salt.

He walks with him down that bilge way a bit, crushes Crowley tight against his chest.

His fingers do not snap as easily like this— with Crowley in his arms, with the skin on his fingers melted into numbed substitutions for digits. He manages it, finally, as the roof is beginning to cave in— as the standing twin beam that pinned Crowley between metal and concrete comes falling down.

_Why did you miracle yourself to Germany in the middle of the night?_

If Michael would even bother asking in the first place.

_Because someone needed an angel in the midst of an air raid. What was I to do?_

* * *

The bookshop smells like smoke.

It’s the clothes, he realizes, burying his nose into the collar of his shirt and inhaling, pulling back disgusted.

_Definitely_ the clothes.

He leans around the corner into the backroom, where Crowley has been stashed on the couch, still unconscious. There is the steady and deep breathing of his lungs matching the clock on the wall, his chest rising and falling in a comforting rhythm.

_He’s okay_ , Aziraphale reminds himself.

He leaves him there for a moment, slips upstairs to pull off his waistcoat, his shirt, his trousers. He stuffs them into a laundry bag and has half a mind of hanging it outside the window.

When he returns downstairs it is in considerably more comfortable clothing, a twin outfit in his hands, a wet towel draped over his wrist.

Crowley is still breathing steadily on the couch, soot edged up high on the bones of his face.

“I’m just going to clean you up, okay?” He says, but there’s no answer, just the easy inhaling, the forceful exhaling.

Aziraphale kneels next to him, takes that face up in his hands.

It fits between his palms, cups easily there as he slides the towel along his forehead, his cheeks, across the strong bridge of his nose. His hair will smell like smoke until he can wash it, he knows, but it’s worth it still to remove this small evidence of hell.

“You’re fireproof,” he whispers, marveling at the lack of burn marks, the lack of bubbling dermis.

He glances down at his palms, at the shine of his burnt skin. It doesn’t hurt much— mostly just feels like there is a layer of something plastic sitting on top of it, crinkling as he flexes his hands.

He ignores it, picks back up the towel, starts cleaning.

“I hope—“ He starts, swallows, reassures himself that Crowley isn’t listening, “I hope that’s not what it’s like.”

There is no response.

“I know,” he says, “I know it’s probably worse than that. It’s probably…” there is a blockage in his throat, air trying to come up around it anyway, “it’s probably so much worse.”

He is whispering and Crowley is making small sounds in his throat as the towel moves across his skin, down the long neck, into the collar of his shirt.

Aziraphale stops to unbutton it, down the long lean chest and down across the narrow belly. The black fabric parts to reveal pale skin unmarred by fire, unmarred save for a massive blossoming bruise from the impact of metal.

“How long did they burn you for?” He can feel himself mouthing the words but can’t hear his own voice over the rush of blood in his ears.

The shirt is mostly hole and ash, falling away beneath his fingers.

“I hope you don’t remember it.”

It lays itself open along the arms, the seams ripping easily. There are the curious marks from many lifetimes of wounds pressed into him, etched there. A bit of barbed wire, a laceration scar, the entry-kiss of a bullet.

Aziraphale eases the towel over the scorch marks along that growing purple bruise— the spiderweb of his smashed veins so close to the surface.

“I think I…” he swallows, blinks back at the sudden startlingly amount of liquid in his eyes, “I think I get it.”

He presses fingers along that collarbone, feeling for a break, not finding one.

“That’s why you want it,” he breathes, and counts the dark eyelashes fanned out on that cheek, “Oh, darling. That’s why you want it.”

There is suddenly so little oxygen in this room and he stares up at the ceiling, trying to catch his breath.

He had always known that Hell was awful. He had read the books, he had known the Biblical accounts. Of course he had known. He had known it in the way that he had known what Eden smelled like in the morning, what color Crowley’s hair was in the sunshine. A certain indisputable fact. Hell is terrible. He did not need to go there to experience it.

But it had been a bit like describing the taste of chocolate to someone without a tongue, describing a sunset to someone without eyes.

He looks back down at Crowley still unconscious on his sofa, wipes away a line of soot from across his chest. He can hear his voice in his head, _because not existing is my back-up plan_.

“Now I know why,” he says softly, smudging his thumb along that dark eyebrow, rubbing at the soot along his cheek.

“Exactly how long,” he can hear himself whispering, “did you have to burn before you became fireproof?”

He exhales an unsteady breath, closes his eyes, _breathes_.

“S’few lifetimes.”

Aziraphale snatches his hand back, wipes furiously at his eyes and the abundance of liquid there.

“Oh, my dear, are you awake?”

Crowley’s eyes are still closed but there is the slightest furrowing of his brows, a creasing of his forehead.

“I think so.”

Aziraphale pushes his hair back, the feathery edge of it leaving lines of soot across his skin, gets a sudden whiff of smoke.

“Is it terrible?”

Crowley squeezes his eyes further shut, not opening them.

“I feel like I’ve been kicked by a mule.”

Aziraphale quirks his lips up in a smile, “do you have first hand experience with that?”

“Oh yeah,” Crowley says, groaning, “hooved creatures hate me.”

“Isn’t your boss hooved?”

“Exactly.”

A golden eye cracks itself open, fixes itself on Aziraphale, and then on the room beyond him.

“We’re in the bookshop,” he says.

“We are.”

“I was in Germany.”

“You were.”

“What the hell happened?”

Aziraphale flinches a bit at the word _hell_. He has seen enough of that place.

“There was an air raid. Over Hamburg.”

“And you came and—“

“Got you.”

Crowley glances up at him quizzically, “I needed getting?”

Aziraphale looks pointedly down at his chest, at the singed clothing, the growing purple bruise. Crowley follows his gaze, lets out an impressed whistle.

“ _Jesus_.”

“You don’t remember?”

Crowley raises up a hand, rubs at his eyes.

“I remember hearing sirens.”

“You must’ve hit your head— when you fell,” Aziraphale says, and then brings a hand up to cradle around his ear, slip back through his hair. Crowley sucks in a breath through his teeth.

“Let me see,” he cards his fingers up, feeling around, the other hand lifting to help cradle his head, “no blood… You’ve got quite a bump back here though.”

“Hurts like a bitch.”

“It’s a rather good thing your skull is so thick.”

Crowley fixes him with an unamused eye.

“I was _sitting_ when I fell,” he says, rubbing a hand across his forehead, “I was working on something. I had a good idea to sabotage the vacuum seal on the door lock.”

“You were pinned underneath one of the boats. Or, at least, the frame of one.”

Crowley glances up at him sharply.

“And you lifted it off me?”

Aziraphale looks down at his hands in his lap, at the marred skin on his palms.

“I had to get you out of there,” he says, as if that explains it.

“That’s… those things are—“ Crowley licks at his lips, a flush running across the heights of his cheeks. Aziraphale looks up at him through his eyelashes, watches that long throat as he swallows, “I suppose a thank you is in order.”

Aziraphale worries at his lip, “I hate to tell you this but the shipyard is gone.”

Crowley blinks, “that bad, huh?”

“I’m afraid so.”

He purses his lips, looks around, “what a shame,” he says, not sounding sorry at all. He finally comes to look at Aziraphale, his eyes roving down his neck to his chest, across to his shoulders.

“What are you _wearing_?”

Aziraphale looks down at himself, “I believe they call them _sweatpants_. Athletes wear them.”

“You’re not an athlete.”

“They’re _comfortable_.”

“You look so different without the bow-tie.”

Aziraphale raises a hand to his throat, feeling rather abruptly naked.

“No I—“ Crowley lifts his hand, touches it softly against his wrist, “no,” he says again, and Aziraphale can see him swallow, “it’s not bad. Just different.”

“I brought you some,” Aziraphale says, and nods over at the table next to them, “if you want.”

Crowley glances over at the pile of gray fabric on the table, then back up to the gray of Aziraphale’s eyes.

“I do,” he says, “want some.”

The air hangs electric between them for a moment, and then Aziraphale is clearing his throat.

“You might want to— you know, clean up. You smell rather a bit of smoke.”

“Do I?” He turns his head to sniff at his shoulder, makes a face in disgust. “I do,” he agrees, and then snaps his fingers.

It’s an odd bit of magic, his hair suddenly a bit cleaner, a bit brighter. But the shirt is still hanging around his shoulders, his shoes having disappeared into the ether. He groans.

“My head hurts,” he says, by way of explanation, and sits up.

“Wow,” he presses amused fingers into the blotchy magenta spill on his chest, “this feels _awful_.”

“It _looks_ rather awful,” Aziraphale adds, “I am amazed you didn’t break your collarbone.”

“You checked?” There is a dark eyebrow quirking up at him and Aziraphale feels his face suddenly heat under the inquiry.

“Of course I checked,” he mutters indignantly, “you may have needed medical attention.”

There is that alarming shade of blotchy red across Crowley’s cheeks, up into the tips of his ears.

“Kind of—“ Crowley clears his throat, looks down at his knees between them, “reminds me of before. You know.”

The smoke-smell of his hair is particularly pungent from this close, even after that attempt at magic, with Crowley bowing his head between them. But there’s his usual smell there too— something like good whiskey and cloves— and Aziraphale finds himself leaning imperceptibly into it.

“Before?” He breathes.

Aziraphale knows what he’s talking about. He knows he means the first go around— the first time the entire world got itself mixed up in a war, the first time Aziraphale dragged Crowley out of a combat zone and pulled a bullet out of him. But he is suddenly desirous of hearing Crowley say it. Of having Crowley put words to it.

“You know,” he says again, and then turns the brilliant amber of his eyes up to Aziraphale’s face, “you always taking care of me.”

Aziraphale is acutely aware of how little oxygen there is in this backroom, of where his clothes sit against his skin. He tries to breathe steadily, tries not to lean down into the magnetic pull of those liquid gold eyes, the parted, expectant lips. There is a shine of white teeth beyond them and the room is suddenly much too loud— that damned clock on his wall, the sound of his own breathing, his own heartbeat.

_Of course I’ll take care of you_ , he thinks, swaying with the suck of his veins, _right down until the very end_.

He pauses, remembering that second circle, the sixth one— the one for the heretics and the one for the lovers— flexes his jaw. Thinks of Crowley in pain, _on fire_ , for another few lifetimes.

_I’ll give it to you_ , he thinks wildly, a heretical thought if there ever was one— knowing that Crowley will light that brush with a bit of Hellfire next to him on that hill, on that distant _someday_. _For when the time comes,_ he thinks, remembering his own voice from decades back— _I don’t want you to hurt anymore. I can’t stand it._

His heart is racing and his breath is far too unsteady— Crowley is waiting, looking at him worriedly for not responding to his simple declaration: _you always taking care of me_.

Aziraphale closes his eyes, tries to ease the thirst of his lungs.

_I’ll give it to you, darling._ _But not yet. Please not yet._

“Do you,” Aziraphale asks slowly, licking his lips and trying to find something, _anything_ else to look at besides Crowley’s eyes, his lips, the sharp jut of his cheekbone, “need anything?” He blinks, worries at his lip, _might as well lean in,_ “for the pain?”

The words come out in a breathless sort of sigh, the tips of his ears on fire. He tries to look at Crowley’s neck, his hair, maybe just his collarbones instead. But there isn’t a safe spot to rest his eyes— the neck is too lovely, the pulse there delicious; the hair smells like smoke and danger and Aziraphale wants to turn the sun on it, watch it shine; the collarbones are a heat sink, a basin to drink from. He stares instead at the safest thing he can find— his own hands in his own lap.

Crowley is clearing his throat, and Aziraphale glances up— is comforted at least by the frenetic pulsing of that vein in his neck.

“I— I think I do,” he says softly, “and I have it on good authority that those morphine syrettes don’t work on me.”

Aziraphale sucks at his incisors, rolls his eyes a bit at the dig, “I didn’t hear you complaining _before_ that.”

There is something shining and hopeful in Crowley’s eyes, gleaming out from beneath the soot, the damaged flush of his skin.

“Never,” he just says, and bites that lip around his smile.

* * *

“This is not exactly what I had—“ Crowley pauses, blows an irritated breath out from between his lips, up into the wet bangs hanging down in front of his face, “in mind when you said _pain relief_.”

Aziraphale rinses another stream of water down that neck, leaned far over the white ledge of his bathtub. There is still a bit of soap along the edge of his ear and he rubs a finger into it, massaging it away.

“You _stunk_ ,” Aziraphale says, biting off the rest of his sentence, the one that goes something like, _and I cannot be reminded of you burning alive_.

Crowley pulls his head up, sits shirtless outside the bathtub.

His wet hair is so dark that it is nearly black, shining dully with the electrical lighting above. It drips down over his cheekbone, shades across his eyes.

“Am I to your standards?” He asks, his words punctuated by the drip of his hair onto the tile underneath.

_Always_ , Aziraphale thinks, and tucks a towel around his neck.

“Better,” he says instead.

_I like you clean_ , he thinks, looking down at the black pants with holes scorched into them.

“We should,” Aziraphale starts, “maybe— you know—“

His ears feel hot.

“Bed?” Crowley whispers, and something about the breathless way he says it eases some of the tightness in Aziraphale’s throat.

“ _Bed_ ,” he agrees, getting shakily to his feet, “ _definitely_ bed.”

“No tile floor this time?” Crowley mutters, Aziraphale pulling him to his feet and pushing him into the bedroom.

“No, you’ll hurt your head,” Aziraphale says, pulling at the remnants of a belt around Crowley’s hips.

It falls away from his fingers, the trousers collapsing in a pile on his floor. He pushes a hand up onto his chest, lays it there against his heart. It thrums quickly beneath his hand, beats out an unsteady rhythm.

“Lie back,” he says softly, and gentles him into the center of his bed.

He follows him up, wedges himself between his knees.

Crowley’s eyes are shining up at him in the near-dark— lit by the glow of the bathroom light and nothing else, the incandescent light painting him in strips of gold.

There is the promise of morning outside his window, of dawn— but not for a few more hours yet. Aziraphale aligns himself with the shadow between Crowley’s legs, runs a tentative hand up the fuzzy stretch of thigh.

It feels new, it always does— and also strangely familiar. Like he has already mapped the edges of his skin into memory, already knows all the secrets locked up inside of it.

But he doesn’t, he knows, not really. He knows that Crowley can see in the dark and that he never really eats. He knows that Crowley does not like to shift into his snake skin anymore, _not since_. He knows that his tongue is an inhuman shade of _flexible_ and also just a bit north of _too long_ and that it forks when he gets really heated.

He knows that there are any number of mysteries that might come spilling out of him at any moment— mysteries that will feel both terrible and wonderful, frightening and magnetic— like the way Crowley’s eyes are just edging into that mother-of-pearl shine in the near-dark.

“Angel.”

Aziraphale looks up and can see Crowley’s pulse in his throat, can see the wired-tightness of his jaw. That inhuman tongue comes out to wet his lips, that sharp fang pulling at the meat of it for one self-conscious moment.

“You saved me,” he whispers.

Aziraphale blinks at him, a weight like lead settling down into his bones, into the pit of his stomach.

_I saved him_ , he thinks, glancing between his eyes. And he understands with a sharp slice of clarity why it had happened— why he had sat up in his chair downstairs where his cocoa has long since grown cold, why the second-hand on that clock had wedged itself between his heartbeats and demanded attention.

_Because it wasn’t your time to die yet_.

“Crowley,” he asks, a little breathless, “have you ever… been discorporated?”

Crowley looks at him quizzically, “you’d know if I had.”

“You’d come back though,” he starts, “if you ever did. Right?”

Crowley wedges himself up on his elbows, winces at the bruise on his chest.

“Of course,” he breathes, “I mean, it might take a while to… get a new body,” he pauses, “I wonder if it would look the same.” He glances down at his naked chest, at the pale skin and the freckles from so many lifetimes— freckles that had bloomed from years under an ancient Egyptian sun, from a field in Scotland three hundred years ago, from a desert only twenty-six since.

_Don’t look back_.

Aziraphale swallows, closes his fingers around the burnt skin of his palms, stares down at the white expanse of Crowley’s skin.

That scar on his arm, that bullet hole in his hip.

His body is a catalog of scars and he wonders wildly if Crowley has any idea— _any_ idea— of what a privilege it is to hold such marks— to have his body be a living canvas of his time on earth. He can change his hair, his clothes, his sex, be all of the genders or none of them— and still maintain the living history of his stewardship on earth, have scars like pins on a map to chart the timeline of his existence here.

And Aziraphale has _none_ of that— less than none. He is always the same, unchanging, _fixed_. He keeps his clothes until they fray at the edges, fall off his body. Because they are the only thing tying him to this great green planet that he loves so much— the only thing that bears the marks of his place here, the only thing to measure his passage of time.

He unfurls his fingers and looks down at the blurred combination of his life line, his head line, his heart line. Decides he’ll hold on to those marks a little while longer.

“Hope so,” Aziraphale says, a bit under his breath, and runs his hands up Crowley’s thighs.

His head immediately tilts back, that long throat exposed to the ceiling. Aziraphale can see his jaw working, his skin moving as he swallows around the sound coming up out of his throat.

Those basins beyond those clavicles are particularly deep— cupping up under his unsteady breathing, like warping floorboards under water. Aziraphale wants to lick them, run his teeth along the edge of them, gnaw at the protruding ends.

“ _Angel_ ,” Crowley breathes, and the hitch in his voice soothes away the enduring fear, the burn of that knife-edge where he stands— torn between not looking back at the place where Crowley came from and not walking forward to the place he might end up. _Damned if you do_ —

“Shh,” he soothes, wrapping delicate fingers around the velvet hardness of him, pressed up into his belly, “ _relax_.”

“Easy,” Crowley bites out, clamping down on his lip with that sharp white fang, “for you to say.”

“Let me handle it,” Aziraphale says, and winces a bit at the burn of his palm on his skin, like Crowley is the one on fire. _The one for the lovers_.

“Sure,” he gasps, “handle me. Right.”

“You get hard so quickly,” Aziraphale muses, pressing a kiss against the bullet-scar, another one into the crease of his thigh.

“Yeah,” Crowley breathes, lying back flat on the bed, squirming a bit at the examination, “I guess.”

Aziraphale glances up, at the stuttering rhythm of his chest trying to pull in air, at the fingers curling in on the bedspread. The pulse of his emotion making the room distinctly _hot_ , thick and humid. _The one for the heretics_.

There is the milky-shine of liquid on his skin, beading up from the tip of him. Aziraphale can remember distinctly the first time he did this— a few feet away on the bathroom tile, behind them. All of it behind them.

He runs his tongue along the length of him, sucks the tip of him into his mouth.

“ _Fuck_.”

Those narrow hips are shifting up, seeking friction. Aziraphale pulls his mouth off, tongues idly at his slit, gathers his fluid.

“Don’t make me hold you down again,” Aziraphale mutters, _déja vu._

He doesn’t miss the way those fingers twist a little further into the bedspread, the jump of those tendons as they grip a little harder.

“You are… absolutely terrible at threats,” Crowley gasps out, leaning up to look down at him between his legs.

“Can’t help it,” he says idly, licking and sucking his way from base to tip, “I’m an _angel_.”

There is some sort of subvocal noise coming out of Crowley’s throat.

“Okay, no,” he sits up, grabs at Aziraphale’s wrist, “come up here.”

“What?” Aziraphale sits up, yanked forward nearly onto Crowley’s chest.

“Take those damned things off,” he says, pushing at the waistband of Aziraphale’s clothes.

There is a bit of shimmying, fabric sliding off to land on the floor. 

“I want you up here. No, no,” Crowley is pushing against his shoulder, “turn around. _Yes_. Now get over here— put your leg—“

“Crowley I am not going to—“ Aziraphale gasps, a bit flushed, “ _sit on you_.”

“You absolutely will,” he insists.

“I will be right over top of your bruise and this is— I’m about to go find the morphine.”

“Will you _shut up_ , just come here and let me thank you for saving me.”

There are Crowley’s steady hands on his thigh, pulling it up across his chest, a knee cradling the outside of his shoulder.

“ _Oh,_ ” Aziraphale breathes, suddenly very, _very_ exposed, “are— are you sure?”

But the reply is muffled by his own thigh.

“You look so mmmph—“ there is a mouth pressed into his hamstring, fingers dipping into the back of his knee, “—so soft and comfy and—“

“ _Crowley_ — this is— I don’t—“

He wishes he were drunk. This would be _so_ much easier if he were drunk.

But Crowley is pressing moans into his skin, pulling him back until he is nearly sitting on his face and he is grateful, at least, that it’s dark.

Crowley pulls his mouth away enough to gasp out something into the skin of his thigh.

“I want this,” he bites out, and there’s something desperate and unhinged there, “is it okay?”

Aziraphale sits up, looks back over his shoulder, “I’m— _yes_ ,” he breathes, his skin feeling like it has been lit on fire, every inch of him ablaze, “are _you_ okay?”

He can see the predatory shine of Crowley’s eyes below him in the dark, can feel the excessive pumping of his heartbeat echoing up from his ribs.

“Angel,” he says, nearly an admonishment, “if I were human I’d say _this is heaven_.”

And then he pulls down on Aziraphale’s hips, licks a hot tongue against his entrance.

“ _Oh_.”

He isn’t sure who is making what noise— the air filled suddenly with a cacophony of pleasure. The steady moaning of Crowley gasping and licking into his skin and the breathy keening of Aziraphale steadying himself on his own thighs, a hand wandering down to Crowley’s torso in the dark.

The angle is so different— Crowley’s cock curves sweetly into him instead of away and he isn’t quite sure he’s doing this right.

“You can lie down,” Crowley is saying, from somewhere underneath of him, behind him, “if you want. Get comfy.”

He is still wearing his sweatshirt, Terry-cloth and warm and he nestles down over the cradle of Crowley’s thighs, runs fingers into the junction of his hip.

“ _Yes_ ,” Crowley is moaning behind him, “ _angel_. Keep me warm.”

Aziraphale moans around the heat of his voice against his skin, drunk on pleasure and vulnerability. He threads his fingers around the hard length of Crowley’s cock, lifts it up to mouth height.

“Of course,” Aziraphale breathes against the tip of him, licking away the liquid there, _always_ , he thinks.

Crowley is _reactive_ — thermodynamic. He pulses up against Aziraphale, licks deeper into him— coating him in heat and that effusive, unyielding emotion.

There is a hand on Aziraphale’s back, pressing him closer— belly to chest, throat to hip— the angel’s cock squeezed somewhere between their bodies, probably pressing against that bruise. The hand disappears, wedges itself underneath his thighs.

There is that long tongue licking into him again, sucking on him, _everywhere_.

There are suddenly fingers at the edge of him, slick with saliva and maybe something else, some bit of miracled wetness. Aziraphale moans around the heat in his mouth, Crowley tasting thick and bright and _sharp_ — like the crisp of an apple, the heat of whiskey.

“ _Angel_ ,” there is a muffled voice behind him, “can I? Is this okay?” There is a mouth tonguing at his balls, the skin behind them, lathing him in earnest thirst.

It’s too much. He’s going to burn up— there is the burden of Crowley’s love suffocating him in this room, the burden of his desire. Unconditional and unyielding. 

Aziraphale pulls back, pants against the impossible hardness of Crowley’s cock, lathes at the slit and the liquid there.

“ _Yes_ , darling, _please_.”

There’s that pleasant burn, his nerves singing, his heart too loud. Crowley is mindless beneath him, writhing, pushing his hips up into Aziraphale’s hand, his mouth, seeking as much contact as he can find.

“Oh angel. Fuck. _Fuck_.”

He’s going to have bruises all over the insides of his thigh, Aziraphale knows, bruises all over his hips. He considers wildly that maybe he will ask for Crowley to leave more marks on him— press more bruising kisses into his skin. Even if they fade. Even if they disappear like a ghost. Something he can hide and carry around underneath his clothes. At least he will bear the mark of a memory for a while. A pin-point on an ever clearing map. Something to chart the timeline of their bodies together.

He has to be careful of his teeth like this— the curve of Crowley in his mouth going the opposite direction. He has a brief and sudden thought of Crowley sucking him off— how he must’ve been so delicate with those crisp white fangs, how he must’ve unerringly shielded them.

It’s so much— _too_ much— Crowley _loves him_ , loves him with an unconditionality that burns, that _terrifies_ him.

“Darling,” Aziraphale gasps, pulling back, emboldened in the darkness, “two?”

There is a desperate sort of whimper behind him, those hips pressing up urgently into him, and then a cautious second finger joining the first, stretching him open.

“Oh, _Crowley_. _Darling_.”

He’s so close to it— that certain spot— and Aziraphale sucks his cock back in his mouth, endeavoring not to say _fuck_ ever again— to not give Crowley _too_ much satisfaction.

Those fingers find it— _there_ — and he rips a moan out around Crowley in his mouth, some other hand wedging between their bodies and giving him something a bit firmer to rut against than just the flat plane of chest.

“ _Yes._ Oh fuck. _Angel_ , that’s so good. You’re so good.”

He wants to say it back— _I’m good yes but so are you— so good. The most good_. But he is incapable of sounds that resemble a language, incapable of anything outside of this mindless hunger. He wants him— all of him— more, yes, _everywhere_.

“Oh fuck, oh fuck, _angel_ — I’m— is it— _can I_?”

He is whimpering around Crowley in his mouth, tries to sound out something that might resemble an _mmhmm_ , vibrating back and forth.

“Come with me?” Crowley gasps, and then there are teeth pressed against his skin, so close to the burn of those fingers, “ _please, please, please_.”

As if Aziraphale could deny him— other things _yes_ , the arrangement and the _anything_ in public, kisses on the lips and certain words, putting a voice to these certain things.

But the hunger of their human bodies is ceaseless and demanding in its pursuit of attention. There is no ability to deny it.

That hand between them is mimicking the rhythm of those fingers inside of him, rubbing at a constant, maddening speed.

Crowley is suddenly frozen beneath him, pulsing in his mouth, a sustained whimper sounding from his throat. And then Aziraphale is there with him— swallowing and releasing across their bellies pressed together, shivering out around an orgasm that seems to stretch into a distillate pleasure so deep he cannot feel his toes.

He pulls Crowley out of his mouth, swallowing, pants down into his hip bone, that bullet-scar.

Crowley is doing something similar behind him, his face mashed into his thigh, gasping out for desperate gulps of air.

It takes more effort than usual to lift himself up, swing himself away from Crowley underneath of him.

There is a bleary, half-formed noise of complaint as he pulls away, the skin across Crowley’s chest immediately raising up in goosebumps.

“Oh,” Aziraphale says, and looks around for the twin sweatshirt, “you’re cold?”

Crowley’s fingers are toying at the hem of his shirt, rubbing against the seam.

“Always,” he mumbles.

The emotion in the room flags, then dims, like it always does. And Aziraphale has half a mind to ask what it means. If the pressing of their bodies together somehow diminishes Crowley’s feelings.

He finds the clothes somewhere behind them, slides the case off a random pillow.

“Here,” he says, and wipes away the spill of himself on Crowley’s chest with the edge of that pillowcase, “sit up and put these on.”

“I see why you like these,” Crowley says, shrugging into the fabric, “it is rather soft.”

“And warm,” he agrees, scrunching up the ankles into easily navigated holes for feet and legs.

“Thanks,” Crowley breathes, suddenly so quiet and small.

They match, somewhat— clothed in twin amorphous gray clothes, both rumpled and tired and perhaps still smelling a bit like smoke.

“Angel,” Crowley says, and reaches out a hand, lying propped up on his side.

It slides flat across the bed to him and Aziraphale takes it, finds the negative space between Crowley’s fingers with his own.

“Thank you,” Crowley says, and Aziraphale can see the movement of his throat as he swallows, the flex of his jaw.

Crowley is threading his eyebrows together, then looking curiously down at his hand. He turns it over, spreads apart Aziraphale’s palm with his fingers.

“Oh,” Aziraphale starts, pulling back, “—it’s quite alright.”

But Crowley’s hand is strong around his wrist, gripping him steadily.

“What is this?” He breathes, drawing down close to look at the blurred skin, the melted heart line.

“It’s— it’s from the U-boat. The— the frame.”

“It… _burnt_ you?” Crowley’s voice is soft and strangely heated, bordering on something like anger. His chest is suddenly moving quickly beneath that shirt.

“Well— yes, there was fire everywhere and I figured it would be hot but—“

“ _Fuck_.”

Crowley drops his hand, pushes himself away from him.

“ _Fucking fix it_ ,” he spits out, the yellow of his irises blown wide.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says, taken aback, sitting back on his heels tucked under him, “it’s fine. It doesn’t hurt.”

“ _Fix it_ ,” he says again, insistent, looking down somewhere at Aziraphale’s chest, breathing heavily. Aziraphale can see the tightness of his jaw, the lines of his veins standing out along his neck.

Aziraphale stares down at his palms, at the erased head line, the conjoined blur of life and heart. He stares at them until they shift away into their normal configuration, the line-work reconfigured.

“There,” he says, and shows his hand, “better?”

There is something wired-tight about the set of Crowley’s shoulders, the hard line of his jaw. It will not soften for a long time.

“Better,” Crowley says, clipped, “why’d you keep it like that?”

His eyes are the gold of star-hearts, even in the dark, even when angry.

Aziraphale swallows, flexes his hands.

“I guess,” he starts, pauses, “I don’t really know.”

_Because it felt good to be a heretic,_ he thinks, _it felt good to be a lover._

He will not tell Crowley that he goes into his bathroom each night after they’ve separated. That he lays his clothes down on that three-legged stool and finds the kisses that Crowley bit into him. That he presses his fingers along those marks and tries to length their lifespans.

Eventually they will fade from red to purple to green to yellow, then disappear. But he will be able to look at the insides of his thighs in the bath and chart the memory of their existence once— like the ghosts of dying stars.

He will remind himself gently, _gently_ — not to look back. But also not to look forward. He will urge the time not to pass. Stay here. Stop moving. Not yet. _Don’t breathe_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In July 1943 the RAF began Operation Gomorrah, where they bombed the city of Hamburg. It had been a very dry summer and as a result of the bombing and the magnitude of dried brush, the resulting firestorm created an inferno with winds of up to 240 kilometres per hour (150 mph) reaching temperatures of 800 °C (1,470 °F) and altitudes in excess of 300 metres (1,000 ft). It incinerated more than 21 square kilometres (8 sq mi) of the city.
> 
> The biblical line that Aziraphale is quoting is Genesis 19:24-- "Then the Lord rained brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, from the Lord out of the heavens." 
> 
> _Déjà vous_ is a pun of "déjà vu"-- it means, _already you_
> 
> Sorry this took so long, the holidays knocked me on my butt and I'll be back to a much more normal posting schedule. Thanks always and forever for any kind comments <3


	4. atomic number five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a love story in three timespans

London

August 1945 (and 1962, and 1967)

They had split the atom, divided one into two.

It had happened sometime between Dust Bowls and Third Reich Rallies, between Francoist Spain and the Great Depression, the _War of the Worlds_ broadcasts and the Nuremberg Laws.

It had happened in 1938, in a building in Berlin named after Kaiser Wilhelm— that German war lord that Crowley had met exactly once, _before._

And now it’s here, on his doorstep, wrapped up in string. Typeset in Times New Roman. _Bold_.

He can see the headline but it is not computing. It gets lost somewhere between his ears.

_End times._

They have split the atom and they are searching for the stuff that powers stars between the electrons, have found something much more terrible instead. An abundance of energy compressed and without a label. A bi-product with a toxic half-life.

He looks across the street, down the sidewalks. Life is amazingly unfettered by the news. There are men rearranging the letters on a marquee, a grocer restocking produce, someone washing the paint on their front door.

“What is it, angel?”

Crowley is inside the bookshop. He has not left since last night.

Aziraphale hands over the newsprint, the weight of the entire world somehow coiled up in that folded bit of paper.

They had stumbled home pleasantly drunk from dinner the night prior, had taken the meandering alleyways home.

Aziraphale had been practicing his lifts, his Ghost Counts. Flourishes over stacks of books. And then Crowley had stumbled through his door without knocking, had wheedled him into going out for a bite and maybe a drink.

“Come on,” he had said, “there’s that new place not too far from here. It’ll be my treat.”

“Just—“ Aziraphale swallows, clears his throat, “they dropped a bomb.” His hands are shaking and he shoves them in his pockets. So many gone. So much destruction. He feels a strange vibrating anxiety, an acute fear of the passage of time. He wonders if it will ever stop.

They had drank too much, and Aziraphale had probably eaten too much, and when Crowley had paid the tab and then stood smoking outside it had _been_ too much— looked too good.

“Come home with me,” Aziraphale had said then, perhaps a bit breathlessly, Crowley holding up the wall with the angle of his lean, “stay a while.”

Crowley had sucked his teeth and looked at him behind those dark glasses. He had shivered a hand into his back pocket and nodded, shyly, because he had known exactly what such an offer meant.

They had taken turns leading— Aziraphale going first. Even drunk on too much wine they knew how to be cautious. A diagonal palm shift. A gravity half pass.

“A bomb?” Crowley is studying the paper in his hands, thumbs smudging over the letters.

He is not wearing his glasses and Aziraphale has a brief moment of wonder at where they’ve gotten to. His eyes flash electric in the daylight.

Crowley had taken to reciting the creation of the earth on their way home. Had drunkenly retold the book of Genesis through a distinctly sardonic lens.

“‘And God saw the light, that it was good,” he had said, gesturing up to the street-lamps and the gas coach-lights outside of shop doors, “and God divided the light,” he had glanced back at Aziraphale with just the slightest tilt of his head, enough to see the color of his eyes over his glasses, those white fangs sharp and dangerous and smiling, “from the darkness.” He had opened his palms in an enticing gesture to himself then, had shrugged and turned back around. 

Aziraphale had watched with his heart in his throat at the movement of those shoulders in his black jacket, at the turn of his head and the translucent jut of his ears holding the street-light through their cartilage.

“The Americans,” Aziraphale is finding it hard to breathe, hard to speak, “they bombed Japan.”

They had stopped at a bodega and purchased something stronger than wine, had passed the paper-bagged contents of it back and forth as they took turns sharing the lead on the narrow streets.

There is something in magic called a Double Lift— where you coyly grab the top two cards and show them to the audience as one. The audience is seeing the bottom card. They think it’s on top.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Crowley breathes, and drops the paper on a table, “that’s— this is—“

“I know,” Aziraphale swallows, removes a hand from his pocket, rests it over his furious heart.

First there had been _Trinity_ , the test bomb, dropped somewhere in a desert. And now _Fat Man_ , _Little Boy_.

You drop the bottom card down onto the deck and wave a hand over it. Give it some flourish. Try to forget the deception, don’t let the trick play out on your face.

At one point Aziraphale had tripped over a bit of upturned sidewalk, a root perhaps lifting it from the rest.

Crowley had grabbed the back of his coat as he had stumbled, had pulled him back upright.

“Careful, angel,” he had said, his voice quiet and protective and deep. Aziraphale had held back his blush, tried to swallow back some heat. The pressure of his knuckles had burned through the jacket, between the bones of his spine. He had smoothed back the look on his face, had not let the trick play out on his face.

“It’s okay,” Crowley is murmuring, stepping up close to him, “this means the war is over and it’ll be okay.”

Aziraphale leans imperceptibly forward, and suddenly there is a forehead butting into his own, the closed-eye sigh of fear and the desperate edge of hope.

“This is _bad_ , Crowley. _Really bad_.”

“It’s bad but it’ll stop things,” Crowley says, always the optimist, “they’ll get better. You’ll see.”

When you finish with the hand-waving and the theatrics you pull up the top card, the one that hid underneath the second. You show it as fact. It’s different. It’s not the card the audience saw. You’ve divided one into two.

They had made it somehow home, Aziraphale breathing into the lock as he had pressed his keys into the cylinder, saying something again like, _“stay a while_.”

He had— stayed a while. Crowley had stayed and he had slept, but not before they had shared handfuls of each other’s body, had pressed mouths into the topography of skin.

At some point they had been stuck together on that too small couch— back to front— sticky with sweat and other fluids, had peeled apart like that top card from that bottom card, a Double Lift— one divided into two again.

Aziraphale had gotten a drink from the tap, had stared naked with his hip on the door at the spread of Crowley on his couch, passed out from drink and the shivering orgasm that Aziraphale could still taste in the corners of his mouth. He had stood there and contemplated the freckles like stars across his skin, his night-sky soul. He had thought about their clothes lying married on the floor, the shadow and the sunshine.

“They took—“ Aziraphale is trying to breathe in the space between them but it is difficult to breathe around Crowley at the best of times. “They are trying to find out what powers stars.”

“Fucking clever little shithead humans,” Crowley is struggling to breathe too, his voice is a stuttered, helpless thing, nearly a laugh. “Making… _bombs_ out of star engines.” He sounds strangely awed.

“You gave them this,” Aziraphale accuses, and pulls back, “this is all your fault,” he teases.

“You could’ve stopped me, you know,” Crowley says back, “one _little_ smite. You could’ve turned my skin into shoes.”

Aziraphale had pulled a blanket around him, had tucked it in around Crowley’s edges. He had brushed a thumb across the corner of his mouth, wondered what he would taste like there. And then he had pulled back, sat up in the wingback chair opposite the couch, had listened to that clock and its hands count down the hours.

Crowley had stirred at one point, had mumbled something that sounded like “ _too much_.”

He can smite things, _yes_ , all angels can. He can lay down a beam of holy power like a lightning bolt, can scorch things into ruin.

“No,” is all Aziraphale can say to that, blinking furiously away at the sudden and inexplicable amount of moisture in his eyes. He frets at the collar of Crowley’s shirt, brushing at it.

He does not like to think about Crowley and smoke, Crowley and _fire_. He would like instead for this black jacket to be made of something fire-proof and atom-bomb proof. Some element that can withstand radiation and fire and even angelic fury. Some card he can lay on top to shield the bottom one. Keep it secret. Don’t show the audience.

There had been a book open on his lap. He had had every intention of reading it but could not look away from the naked stretch of Crowley’s shoulder in the moonlight, at the jagged barbed-wire scar.

There is no mark from the super-heated metal of the frame he had been trapped under, years ago, but Aziraphale can still recall the magenta spill of crushed veins there, across his chest, up into his collarbones.

He had wondered where the time went.

“Kidding, angel,” Crowley says gently, and a thumb comes up as if to brush across his cheek. The movement gets shuttered, stops, and the hand hangs there for one stilted moment before falling back to his side.

“I know,” Aziraphale looks up at him, into those eyes like the engines of stars, the hearts of gold that power them.

Crowley had woken up exactly once in the middle of the night, had sat up bleary eyed and naked, his hair sticking up like a haystack.

“M’sorry,” he had mumbled, had scrubbed a hand across his face, “I should go.”

“No,” Aziraphale had said it perhaps a bit too fast, “no, stay. It’s quite alright.”

Crowley’s eyes had shined in the dark, opalescent.

“You sure?”

“Of course. I’ll… keep an eye out,” he had said.

“‘Kay,” Crowley had responded, already slunk down into the warm nook of the sofa, the nest of blankets. “M’damned anyway, I guess.”

He had already been half asleep when he had said it. Aziraphale had known it was nothing more than the sleepy half-formed musing of a mind already too far gone with exhaustion.

Aziraphale had tried not to think about. He had failed spectacularly.

“Do you want me to go?” Crowley whispers, and Aziraphale wonders how he could ever possibly think that.

“No,” he says, “stay a while?”

There is a lift to the corner of Crowley’s mouth at the echoed phrase.

“Okay,” he says, “I’ll stay. Whatever you want, okay?”

Aziraphale had watched him sleep the entire night. Had gotten up twice for another blanket to tuck up around his ears, to straighten the drape of it across his legs.

“I’ll give it to you,” he had whispered, and had tucked the long drag of Crowley’s growing hair behind his ear.“But not yet, okay?”

Crowley’s mouth had been open slightly, he had been able to see the dreamy wet pink of his tongue, the shine of his teeth.

“Just give me more time,” Aziraphale had whispered.

It isn’t long before the sign on the shop door has been flipped to _closed_ , before Aziraphale has determined that there will be no customers today, not if he can help it.

“It’s not yet past ten, angel,” Crowley is saying somewhere behind the register, “little early to be closing up, isn’t it?”

“I have other things on my mind,” he says, and its with a degree of agitation, an edge of fear.

Crowley tilts his head at him, sucks the corner of that lip into his mouth.

He understands. Crowley doesn’t need to say that he understands for Aziraphale to know it.

“It’ll be okay,” Crowley just says instead.

Aziraphale doesn’t know it yet, but in 1962 a strategist will coin a term for the burgeoning likelihood of entire nations wiping each other out with those engines of stars. He will call it _Mutually Assured Destruction_. The phrase will stick.

“I just— I think I’m going to make myself some cocoa and sit down.”

“That’s, yeah,” Crowley runs a hand through his hair, shifts his hips against the counter, “that’s a good idea. Take it easy, you know?”

“Do you want some?” Aziraphale asks, knowing the answer is no.

“Nah, I’m okay.”

Aziraphale takes a stuttering step towards the backroom, towards the kitchenette, “will you sit with me?”

There are sunglasses in the till next to Crowley’s hand, a relict of an earlier time, many decades out of date.

“Of course,” he says softly, “always.”

In 1965 a sex shop will open next door to the bookshop, a head shop will open down the street. There will be dirty magazines and short skirts, boots up well past the knee. He will find singular playing cards with naked ladies on them caught between curb and street.

Theaters will open up with suggestive marquees and velvet pink rooms offering a show behind glass. There will be curious smudges on the separation, a slot for greedy coins in recompense for companionship. A promise of something maybe like love with a half-life of one half-hour.

 _Come home with me,_ it will say, _stay a while_.

It might just be Aziraphale’s imagination or the warmth of the cup in his hands, but he believes he can still feel the heat of Crowley’s body still echoing up from the sofa. He wiggles on it, presses his shoulders into the cushions.

Crowley is across the room, head tilted and scanning the spines of the many dusty first-editions lining the walls.

“It all seems a bit fast, doesn’t it?” Aziraphale says, and stares down at his chocolate.

“Hmm?” Crowley does not look up from the shelves.

“Just— the bombs, the war. It feels like yesterday that we were—“ he stops, looks up, “that we were in a desert. In a different war.”

Crowley is a creature of _movement_ , he is so very rarely still. So it is always with something a bit like pride that Aziraphale gets to say something that will turn him to stone.

“Does it?” Crowley says faintly, finally moving again, his ears turning rather pink, “it all seems a bit long to me.”

He will hear things that year about a man hiring a variety of miscreants. He will hear about an alleged plot to rob a church.

Aziraphale will perhaps spend too long sweeping the sidewalk in front of his store as people chat outside that sex shop. He will perhaps listen for any rumor and then studiously not mention it to Crowley.

“It’s just,” Aziraphale inhales and closes his eyes, tries very hard to quell the furious suck and thump of his heart, “they went from riding horses to dropping atom-bombs out of planes. It’s all so _fast_.”

He rubs a hand into his face, leaves it there over top of his eyes.

It will be difficult not to mention it. What with Crowley coming around in the evenings looking exhausted. It will be difficult not to mention it over dinners and drinks, in between what will turn out to be meetings with various petty criminals for hire.

“Hey,” Crowley’s voice is suddenly very close, the cup in his hands lifted away. “We might not have forever, but we’ve got time right now.”

Aziraphale pulls his hand down from his face, lets it fall into his lap.

Crowley is sprawled on the floor in front of him— one knee lifted up and an elbow dangling off of it. There is exactly half of a smile on his face, those gold eyes steadfastly brilliant.

“It’s just us,” he says, and slides a hand up Aziraphale’s thigh, “right now.”

Aziraphale is breathing but it’s difficult; he does not know what to do with his hands. He wiggles one underneath his thigh, between leg and couch, and the other one he slides up on top of Crowley’s, palms it.

“ _Crowley_ ,” he whispers, nearly a chide, “we… we _already_ …”

It had just happened last night. Not even twenty-four hours ago. They have never had such a fast turn-around. Have never answered that call more than once in a month, let alone a day.

“It’s just us,” Crowley says again, his voice like last night— quiet and protective and deep.

Aziraphale squeezes the fingers underneath his palm, has a sudden desire to double lift, put them back together.

He looks around the room for some excuse: papers to be organized or books to be shelved or a floor to be swept. And there are papers strewn across his desk, books laid out since last Tuesday, a floor that has rarely seen a broom. The excuses die one by one in his mouth, and he looks down to see Crowley’s chin resting on his knee.

In 1967 Aziraphale will accost the young Scottish man that he has seen lurking around Soho, will ask him for help. He will say, “I need you to be my eyes around here. Can you do that?”

And the young man, who will be named Shadwell, will agree.

“I will pay you to investigate this… rumor of a church robbing. Can you help me?”

“Aye,” he will say, “I’ve heard of the thing.”

“Very good,” Aziraphale will say, and send him off with half of his estimated price.

“It’s… it’s just us,” Aziraphale repeats, and blinks down at him as he says it. It’s not true. He knows it isn’t true. Such a thing will _never_ be true. There will always be Heaven between them, Hell between them— any number of angels and demons and perhaps even God herself between them. Eventually there will be death between them. An eternity without.

But perhaps, he thinks, if they are very lucky, they will end up in the same place.

“I’d like to keep you on retainer,” Aziraphale will say, when Shadwell returns with the details of a private meeting in a backroom. “For as long as you’re willing.”

“I would be amenable to that,” he will say, and take the remainder of his payment with a handshake and maybe something like a smile.

“And if you ever get any, erm, accomplices I should like to hire them as well. Have a… network, so to speak.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Shadwell will say, and disappear out of the alley between book and sex shop.

A place for the lovers perhaps, a place for the heretics.

 _Well_ , he thinks, suddenly desirous of Crowley’s mouth and being inside of it, _if that’s where we end up anyway_.

“Crowley,” he breathes, looking down into those eyes that haven’t left his, “would you?”

“Whatever you want,” Crowley says, and his eyes are alight with something like mischief, something like nostalgia.

His hand slides out from underneath Aziraphale’s palm, rubs all the way up his thigh.

Aziraphale tilts his head back, endeavors not to watch. It is… _frightening_ how much he wants this. How many times does one need to drink before they have sated a thirst? Is once no longer sufficient?

Aziraphale will bless the water himself. He will not allow for something to go wrong. He will close his eyes as he does it, will say the Latin and make the sign of the sacrament. He will send out a tiny, silent prayer along with it.

 _Stay a while_ , he will hope.

“When,” he gasps out, Crowley’s fingers pulling at his fly, “did they figure out how to split _atoms_?”

The trousers are getting tugged unceremoniously off his hips, pulled down to the floor.

“Nh, maybe—“ Crowley mashes his face into the junction of thigh and hip breathes him in like a person denied oxygen, “maybe between Huxley and Faulkner.”

Aziraphale will find Crowley exiting a smoky backroom one evening when he finally decides to do it. His hands will be shaking, will _have been_ shaking for the entire week prior.

He will watch his long legs and his long hair and his round glasses exit that black building, will watch him step inside the Bentley. And Aziraphale will not be able to open the door, his hands shaking too badly. So he will blink and find himself inside of it anyway. Next to Crowley. Breathing in the smell of home.

Crowley’s mouth is hot and wet and deep and he marvels at how he disappears down the long throat, how that jaw opens to swallow him down.

“ _Oh_ , darling,” he fists a hand in Crowley’s hair, another coming down to cup at his jaw, around his ear. “That— that feels—“

Crowley is eyes closed and moaning, a hand coming up and wrapping around Aziraphale too.

There’s movement between his legs, a shimmy and a scuffle as Crowley yanks his own clothing down one-handed around his thighs, then wiggles out of them completely.

“Yes, yes. That’s so good. You feel so good. I like—“ Aziraphale gasps out, looks sightlessly up at the ceiling, “I like when you feel good too.”

Crowley stops for a moment, pulls off of him, presses his forehead into his belly. The hand between his legs stops too and Aziraphale can see him squeezing around the base, breathing unsteadily.

“ _Jesus_ ,” Crowley breathes.

“Oh, my dear— are you alright?”

“Just— _fuck_ ,” he presses his forehead a little firmer into Aziraphale’s belly, “I almost, you know.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale hesitantly threads a hand through his hair, rubs the strands between his fingers. “Is that a bad thing?”

Crowley looks up with color in his cheeks.

“I mean,” he breathes, “I’d rather it last.”

“I live in Soho,” he will say, his heart pummeling out its rhythm in his throat, “I hear things.”

Crowley will look shocked and maybe a bit guilty behind his dark glasses.

“I’ve heard you are planning a… caper,” he will say, and not look at Crowley, “to rob a church.”

The car will feel very small, dripping with the red lights of so many sex shops, so many dirty cinemas.

“I can’t have you risking your life,” he will whisper, “even for holy water.”

“Me too,” Aziraphale breathes, and is suddenly grabbing at Crowley’s arms, pulling him up off the floor.

“Here,” he is saying, “like this?”

And suddenly there is a Crowley in his lap— all pale skin and liquid indecision, angles and questions and bones. Aziraphale wants to put them back together. Make the two into one.

He is shivering underneath of Crowley’s long legs, pulling his hips up close.

Crowley’s collarbones are suddenly at mouth level and he sucks one in between his teeth, eyes up at the constellation of freckles on his neck. _Ursa Minor_.

He wiggles a hand between them, takes both of their cocks in between his hand, slick and hot.

Crowley squeezes out something like a whimper between his teeth, wraps an urgent arm around Aziraphale’s shoulders, a hand dropping down between them.

“ _Fuck_ , angel,” he grinds out, and laces their fingers together, a double lift, “you’re gonna fucking kill me.”

He will hand over a tartan thermos filled to the brim with the water he has blessed. Will try to quell the furious shaking of his hand as he does it.

Their fingers will touch as it passes hands. Aziraphale will be reminded of the fire in Crowley’s fingertips, will be reminded of the water in the thermos. A nuclear option in equal measures. Mutually Assured Destruction.

“This is the real thing?” Crowley will ask.

“The holiest,” Aziraphale will say, because he will have blessed it himself. “Don’t go unscrewing the cap.”

 _Ever,_ Aziraphale will think _._

“After everything you said,” Crowley will mutter.

There is a trick where you grab the top two cards and show them to the audience as one. The audience is seeing the bottom card. They think it’s on top.

Crowley will stare down at the container with a mixture of awe and indecision, will look like he is holding an atom-bomb between his palms.

“Should I say thank you?” He will ask, and will look up at Aziraphale with an unsteady set in his shoulders, like a weight has suddenly been placed there and he does not understand why.

Aziraphale gasps and closes his eyes, squeezes them up closed. His throat is suddenly so tight, an uncomfortable prickling behind his eyes. There is liquid there— spilling out underneath his eyelashes and falling down onto his cheeks.

He presses an unsteady kiss into that collarbone, overwhelmed with Crowley’s hand laced into his, the pleasure of their bodies pressed together, the weight of his words.

“Don’t,” Aziraphale gasps, “don’t say that.”

“Better not,” Aziraphale will say, because he does not wish to be thanked for giving Crowley a suicide pill, a liquid with a toxic half-life. He will not want to be thanked for giving him an out to the ineffable plan.

“Can I… drop you somewhere?” Crowley will ask, the thermos still in his hands.

“I fucking—“ Crowley is gasping into the top of his head, the tip of his ear, shivering in his lap, “I fucking— _too much_ ,” he grinds out. “Too _fucking much_.”

Their hips are rocking up into the cup of both of their palms— tiny, stilted movements amplified by their combined full body trembling. A vibration that won’t stop.

“No,” Aziraphale will say, “thank you.”

Crowley will look confused, put-out. As if Aziraphale has just gone off-script. As if Aziraphale has showed his hand. Crowley will not be able to understand why the magician is not palming the bottom card too, why he is performing some other trick.

“Slower, darling,” he gasps, _stay awhile_.

Crowley is falling swiftly to pieces on top of him, unsteady fingers grasping at his shoulders, his neck, the sofa behind them. “S— sorry,” he bites out, his forehead pressed into Aziraphale’s temple.

“It’s—“ Aziraphale gulps, “it’s okay. It’s just— so good. You feel so good. I want it to last.”

“Oh don’t look so disappointed,” Aziraphale will say.

Crowley will look gutted, hollowed out. He will look the way that Aziraphale feels.

“Perhaps one day we could have a picnic,” he will say, knowing that they have gone on many picnics, yes, but none in the timeline where Crowley has a permanent exit plan, a detonator in his pocket. “Dine at the Ritz.”

“ _Angel_ ,” his voice cracks as he says it, “me too— but I can’t. I can’t I can’t—“

There is a steady vibration that begins in his thighs and shivers up his spine. An earthquake in the center of his hips.

Crowley is keening softly in his ear, canting into their shared fist. Aziraphale squeezes a little harder, opens his eyes to find the North Star on Crowley’s neck— follows it home.

“I’ll give you a lift,” Crowley will plead. And Aziraphale will be able to hear his thoughts behind it. Something that will sound like, _don’t leave me yet_. _Come home with me. Stay awhile._

And Aziraphale will think the same thing back. He will think that he would like to put the pieces back together. Make the two into one again.

He will not abide in this future where Crowley has an unstable half-life, where Crowley can disappear from him completely. There will be no trick to it, he knows. There will be no reveal.

“Anywhere you want to go,” Crowley will say. And Aziraphale will be able to hear the layered meaning underneath of it. Will be able to translate that language that they invented themselves. He will hear the unvoiced continuation of that sentence: _as long as I can come too_.

They come together with skin between their teeth and their names in each other’s mouths. It stretches and erases time.

Aziraphale is breathing into the rock pools of Crowley’s collarbones, trying to forget that it is still only morning, about the bad news that had been dropped onto his doorstep.

Crowley sits for longer than usual in his lap, their hands still woven together, a pillar of liquid salt between them.

He will look at Crowley across the vermillion interior of that nearly sentient automobile, will see his own history on the face of his friend.

Do not let the trick play out on your face.

Aziraphale pulls back, slightly. Stares down at the joint mess on their laps, at Crowley still trembling on top of him. He stares at the very close side profile of Crowley’s bottom lip, watches as it quivers with his steadying breath.

He wonders if Crowley realizes that when he comes it’s like having a neutron star explode in his arms. If he realizes the magnitude of his emotions that implode, condense— a gravitational collapse— then expand, _explode_.

“Sorry,” Crowley is breathing, pulling away, “couldn’t,” he stops, swallows, tries to find his voice, “couldn’t catch my breath.”

“It’s quite alright,” Aziraphale murmurs, pulling their sticky hands apart. _Stay a while_ , he thinks.

He will also see the future. He will see that star-freckled forehead on a red-chalk hill. He will see the infernal engine of those eyes like star hearts go dim and then dark. He will be able to see right down to the end.

“Thanks for,” Aziraphale swallows, blinks up at Crowley pulling his jeans back up onto his hips, “you know, _staying_ , my dear.”

Aziraphale clears his throat, straightens up his clothes.

“When are you going to realize,” Crowley starts, throwing him a dangerously sharp smile, his long hair hanging down across his face, “that you can’t get rid of me?”

It is the second time in nearly ten minutes that Crowley’s words have sent an ice pick into his heart.

He will have that image painted in his head, behind his eyes, every time he blinks. He will wonder how much time they have left.

In his head there is an hourglass, and the sand inside is red.

“You go too fast for me, Crowley,” he will say, and he will be able to hear his friend’s heart break.

 _Come home with me,_ he will think, _stay awhile_.

“Don’t,” Aziraphale tries to smile, to perhaps inject a bit of a jesting cadence into his voice, “don’t say that, my dear.”

“It’s true,” Crowley shrugs, and it’s so easy for him. It’s always so easy. He throws his heart right up on his sleeve, doesn’t fret when it bleeds there.

Aziraphale will get out of that car, will leave the atom-bomb safely packed away in that thermos in Crowley’s care, will have faith that he won’t push the detonator.

He will leave the car and the one will become two again and go about their lives. He will stand outside on that wet city street in a town he no longer recognizes. He is a stone in a shifting desert. A fossil in the ever-changing earth. 

An establishment offering stripteases will illuminate above him, will offer something maybe like love for a half-life of one half-hour. He will watch Crowley’s car drive off down the block, will watch it turn and disappear.

He will hope that he has more time yet, before they disappear. Time still to be a lover. Time still to be a heretic.

“It’s not even noon yet,” Crowley says absently, staring down at his wristwatch, “care to go for brunch?”

Aziraphale stares up at him, fiddles with his hands in his lap.

“I suppose we could,” he says, and feels somehow instead like time is running out.

“You go,” Aziraphale says, “I’ll meet you there.”

A marquee will light above him. A neon letter _O_ in the word _love_ will flash electric above his head. It will flare once brilliantly as he thinks about Crowley, and then will stutter and burn out as he thinks about heaven.

 _Come home with me_ , he will think, and will stare down at where Crowley’s car had disappeared, _stay awhile._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _atomic number five_ refers to the element boron, which is used for a variety of purposes. Boron-10, one of the naturally occurring isotopes of boron, is a good absorber of neutrons and is used in the control rods of nuclear reactors, as a radiation shield and as a neutron detector. 
> 
> thanks always for any kind words that are left <3 I love them dearly!


	5. perestroika

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I owe a lot of love to the people who were cheerleading me over on Tumblr. You're all the most wonderful <3
> 
> (and finally, there is a veryyyy brief and non-violent mention of blood. It is of the lip-biting kind and just didn't want anyone to read that further down and potentially get squicked out)

1985

First, it had been simple wire. Moments of concrete block. First it had been a simple cleared space, _the death zone_ — like an invisible arm had come sweeping through the city and cleared a line. Put down barbed wire. Put up fencing.

It had worked then, for a time, to keep people out. To separate east from west.

But then they got through, started moving back and forth, got inventive, found their own ways around it.

So then the fencing had been improved— chains and links. More concrete. Higher sides and deeper death zones. Areas where cars weren’t allowed and people weren’t allowed and the whole place stunk like vacancy and unrest. Trash would gather up along the fence-line and no one would dare pick it up.

Now it’s bigger. Improved again— if such a thing could even be called an improvement. Made more monstrous perhaps, made more terrible. It splits the sky. It keeps the sunrise from seeing the sunset.

It is now a concrete behemoth. An engineered bulwark of poured cement four meters high and nearly one and a half meters thick.

The buildings that face it look shelled naked and shivering, embarrassed of such an emptiness along what used to be living street.

He comes here, sometimes, at night. For Hell. For himself. He comes here to smoke too many cigarettes and watch the night sky and stand in that death zone. He comes here and watches the renegade artists throw something beautiful and angry up onto that wall, comes to hide them from policing eyes. He likes to breathe in the fumes of spray paint and political unease, stand at the fringes of life and watch the world try and operate like there isn’t an iron curtain dividing it.

He comes here, too, to make small miracles for the ones crossing that wall. He comes here to see to it that they make it from East to West. To help them see that sunset again. A substitute Charon ferrying souls across a border.

He comes here— sometimes— to kick at that wall, and curse its existence, and wish that such things didn’t exist.

* * *

_London_

His hair is too long and there are holes in his jeans. Black and faded. There are chips on both shoulders and a bit of a sway to his walk, something that belies the weathering ache that lays down in his bones at this time every year.

“You know how to cook?” Aziraphale is asking.

“Sort of,” Crowley says, a thumb hooked in his belt pocket and sagging uselessly against the wall.

“But… my dear boy, you barely even _eat_.”

Crowley looks up at him through his glasses, looks up at him from this book he has pulled spine-first out of a pile and is casually flicking through— something to distract him from asking this monumental question.

“I eat,” he mumbles, “sometimes.”

“I haven’t seen you— oh,” Aziraphale, as if remembering his always impeccable manners, stops himself and smooths a hand down his waistcoat.

It is the _same_ waistcoat he has been wearing for the last eighty or so odd years. Crowley can see the threadbare moments of its fabric along where worried fingers have scratched at it.

“It’s fine,” Crowley says, and snaps the book shut, “it was just an idea.”

 _A stupid one_ , he wants to say.

“No, I,” Aziraphale clears his throat, looks at him reproachfully, “I think I’d rather enjoy that.”

“Okay,” Crowley says, “my place?” He is trying to act like it doesn’t matter. Like none of this means anything when it so very clearly does.

“Your place,” Aziraphale says, as if he hadn’t been there exactly once and witnessed a terrible scene when he was.

“K,” Crowley tries to clear the incredible bit of something lodged in his throat. “Say, seven?”

“Seven,” Aziraphale agrees.

“Seven,” Crowley says, softly.

* * *

He is not sure he has ever been this nervous.

He has spoken to kaisers and kings, emperors and popes. He was, at one point, worshiped as a god and at another point nearly burned as a witch. He should be okay with this. He should be able to handle having his oldest and dearest friend pop over for dinner.

But he isn’t, and he can’t, and he isn’t sure what to do. 

He had hid the boxes on his windowsill, tucked the winged statue from St. Mildred’s church away in the corner. He had stress-cleaned every inch of his flat from top to bottom, scrubbed the floors and scrubbed the walls. The bathroom tile is clean enough to use as a dinner plate— not that it had ever even seen much use to begin with.

And now he is waiting, fidgeting nervously, straightening sundry ingredients on his counter.

He has updated his furniture every decade on the dot, his embarrassment of not having had a sofa the first time Aziraphale saw his flat forever immortalized in his mind.

So now there are chairs and sofas, a desk set with what one might consider a throne. There are televisions and stereos and he isn’t sure how they work or if they’ve even been properly plugged in but they function all the same.

The floors are still stone and the fireplace is still stone but everything else is _white_ — shined and smooth— not a hard angle in the place. _Modern_.

There is a buzzing at his door and he can suddenly feel his heartbeat in his shoes.

When did his hallway get so long? When did his door get so tall? Perhaps it grows when there is an angel on the other side of it. The handle feels wrong in his hands.

Aziraphale is pale skinned and smiling when he opens it.

“You could’ve just come in,” Crowley says in lieu of a greeting— because he doesn’t like the idea of Aziraphale waiting out on the street, in the steadily pouring rain. “I don’t even knock on the bookshop anymore,” he says, and then thinks that maybe he should.

“I thought that perhaps the first time I came over should be… formal,” Aziraphale is saying, stepping through his door.

“But you’ve been here before,” Crowley mutters, and Aziraphale gives him a very pointed look that clearly says, _we aren’t going to talk about that_.

“Come in,” he says, and walks off down the hallway, “I haven’t started yet.”

Aziraphale is toeing off his wet shoes and lining them up by the door. Crowley watches him look up and around.

“You changed it,” Aziraphale says in wonder, as if it is remarkable for someone to alter their living space after sixty-years.

“I change it every couple years,” Crowley says off-handedly over his shoulder, leading Aziraphale down the long hallway.

It opens up to a kitchen, a U-shaped alcove of shiny appliances and tall ceilings, and beyond it the room with that stone fireplace, a couch, too many electronics.

“You do?”

Aziraphale is standing with one hand on the back of his very white sofa, just there beyond the kitchen counter, staring at the sculptural mass of electronics against the wall.

He sounds almost disappointed.

The question is punctuated by the uncorking of a wine bottle.

“I do,” Crowley says, and pours him a glass.

“Why?”

Crowley looks at him curiously, smiles.

He wants to say, _because the only thing I like that stays the same is you_.

Instead, he shrugs and takes a sip and looks around the room.

“It’s something to do, I guess,” he says, “you know. To fill the time.”

Aziraphale, who looks as though he has never before felt the grip of boredom, threads his eyebrows together in a confused smile.

“To fill the time?”

“Yeah,” Crowley pushes his glasses up a bit higher on his nose, “you know, something to occupy myself with. Not all of us can get lost in books.”

“And… that?” Aziraphale sips primly from his glass, nods up at the wall of electronics.

“More distraction from boredom.”

Aziraphale walks over closer to it, the couch a white cloud between them.

He is nodding at the television. It’s a giant square thing set back into the wall. Too big for the space.

“They’ve gotten _so big_ ,” he says, as if he is talking about a child, a plant, a tree.

He watches Aziraphale watch the television. There is a horror movie that has just started playing on the screen— _The Exorcist_ — and Crowley has half a mind of telling Aziraphale the story of how priests had thrown holy-water on people queueing up for it in the cinemas.

“Yeah,” he says quietly, “they have, haven’t they?”

“I don’t think I’ve watched a television since—“ Aziraphale is suddenly laughing breathily, the sound of it coming out around his smile, “since that summer.” He flushes a very fetching shade of peach. “You know.”

He means the summer of ’69, when Crowley had wheeled a television into the backroom of the bookshop and they had stayed glued to the sofa for nearly a week watching the humans make it to the moon.

“She must hate this,” Crowley had said, half-awake that morning at nearly dawn, as the first human took the first step on the lunar surface.

“Yeah,” Crowley says, “I kind of figured,” and has to smile then, because they had spent a good portion of that week fooling around on the sofa, watching BBC1 with their hands underneath each other’s clothes.

Aziraphale’s eyes are so very liquid across his couch, like the shine of so much white in his flat is reflecting back into him. Crowley chews on his lip and sips at his wine and tries not to think about how they can so clearly be talking about sex without saying anything at all.

* * *

It’s a terrible mess, cooking.

He cannot get the jar open. The water is bubbling over on the stove.

He has practiced this before— _many_ times— but nothing seems to be working as it did during dress rehearsal.

He wonders if perhaps Aziraphale has a negative effect on the appliances in his flat.

“Do you need help with that?” Aziraphale asks, and is suddenly right behind him.

—Or perhaps just an effect on _him_.

“Oh,” Crowley says, “sure,” and tries not to let too much color into his cheeks.

Aziraphale looks him in the eye as he palms the jar, pops the lid.

“You must’ve loosened it for me,” he says, with something like a twinkle in his eye.

“Yeah,” Crowley says, and can’t look away from the light there, “must’ve.”

There are tomatoes and garlic and basil, good salt from the sea. There is also wine, _lots_ of wine, and maybe a few stolen swigs of whiskey.

They have been dancing around each other for enough centuries that a handful of minutes in the nearly unused kitchen of Crowley’s flat feels strangely natural. Like they’ve done it before or some similar approximation. Like the Arrangement has somehow prepared them for making the simplest of human meals that may turn out to be inedible.

Aziraphale is standing and stirring and all Crowley can see is the back of him, the soft shoulders and the gentle waist. He has rolled up the sleeves on his shirt and Crowley can see the fair freckled skin of his forearms covered in gold-dust hair, the delicate wrists, a pair of sturdy hands.

The skin on the front of Crowley’s body feels like it is about to lift off of him and float over, commit mutiny for touch.

He turns away and drains the water and tries not to think about what it would be like to lock his arms around Aziraphale’s waist, press his face into the brushed cotton of his hair. Maybe push his hands into the sink and his hips into Aziraphale’s back and whisper all the things he’d very much like to do to him into that large and delicately curved ear.

Aziraphale is watching him touch the metal of the pot with his bare hands. There is something like heat in his eyes.

“You ok?” Crowley asks, because the weight of his gaze is burning a hole into his chest.

“You’re fireproof,” Aziraphale mutters, and pours himself more wine.

He is, he supposes. And he is suddenly desirous of knocking the glass out of his hand and replacing the rim of it in Aziraphale’s mouth with his lips. He wants to shove him up against the counter and unlock those even white teeth with his tongue, pull moans up out of his throat.

But he can’t. And he knows it. And he hates it.

There is a wall between them, Crowley knows. An iron curtain. They do not talk about what the wall is made of or who is at the top of it. He has already tried that. They do not talk about trying to get around it or trying to climb up it. He knows there is barbed wire up there, he knows who is watching from the guard tower. They do not talk about what they are or what they are not.

They are _de facto_ lovers, yes. But they are also enemies, _de jure_.

And enemies do not kiss on the mouth.

Crowley had set a place with plates and silverware but they have abandoned it in favor of standing upright in his kitchen, barefoot and leaning against the counters.

“This is actually quite good,” Aziraphale is saying, sometime later. Sometime after the heat of the metal pot has cooled and Crowley’s desire has cooled and they are still just standing in his kitchen. Six-thousand years old and finally figuring out how to be human.

“Why do you sound surprised?” Crowley asks, drinking too much and eating too little.

“I’m _not_ — I’m just,” Aziraphale is twirling pasta on his plate, his socked foot outstretched and nearly touching Crowley’s, “impressed, is all.”

There is warmth there, _pride_ , small and fluttering tiny wings in Crowley’s chest like some sort of persistent butterfly. He doesn’t know what to say so he drinks more wine and tries to cover it up when it spills down the corner of his mouth.

He wipes the back of his hand across his lips and mutters a small, “ _thanks_.”

“Where did you learn to do this?”

Crowley looks down at the collection of ingredients on the plate— the simplest assembly of flavors.

“It’s not anything special,” he says.

“It’s more than I can do,” Aziraphale says with a shrug.

“We _have_ been in Rome quite a bit,” Crowley says by way of explanation, “over the years.”

The statement hangs in the air for a long while.

“You have to leave soon, don’t you?” Aziraphale asks.

The question is very quietly voiced, over the sound of a fork on a plate, over the sound of the rain outside his windows.

Crowley clears his throat, leans a little harder into the counter.

“Yeah,” he says, “for a little while.”

Aziraphale puts down his fork and lets his shoulders fall, stares down at his countertop.

“Back to Germany then?” He says, and Crowley can hear the edge of regret underneath the agreeable tone.

“You got it,” Crowley mumbles into his wine glass.

“You’ll be safe, won’t you?”

Crowley looks up at him across the span of kitchen. Aziraphale is staring studiously down into his wine glass.

“So much… political tension over there,” Aziraphale says, trying to force a smile, “I hear they shoot on sight at the wall and—“ he pauses and swallows and takes a sip of wine, “you know. _Be careful_.”

“‘Course,” Crowley says softly, “you know me, careful is my second middle name.”

“Last week you told me _danger_ was your middle name.”

“Eh,” Crowley waves his hand, noncommittal, “either or really.”

“Anthony J. _Careful_ Crowley sounds a lot better, in my opinion,” Aziraphale says primly, and his eyes blaze over his wine glass, “it’s got a nice alliteration.”

The sound of his full name in that neat mouth does something strange to Crowley’s pulse. Sends the valves in his heart gasping.

“Kind of messes with my image though, doesn’t it?”

Aziraphale is smiling at him and Crowley looks around his kitchen in sudden suspended wonder— six-thousand years and sundry shared meals and they are finally arriving at some semblance of normalcy. Not happiness maybe, not completely. But not _unhappiness_ either.

This is it, he knows. This is how it’s going to be. The realization hits him with a clap of clarity. There will be no kisses. There will be no wedding ring. There will be no happily ever after and no breakfasts in bed. There will be no Sunday afternoons wrapped up on the sofa, doing the crossword. There will be no mingling of toothbrushes kissing in the same sink-side cup. There will not be a word like _husband_ to define him when someone asks. There will be no descriptor attached to his name other than _friend_. Maybe _best friend_ , if he is feeling particularly broken open.

But no permanence, no weight, no _forever_. Not that they have that anyway.

What they have, Crowley thinks, is that wall. A wall that separates the sunrise from the sunset. A wall that keeps the East from the steadily darkening West. A wall that Crowley is bricking into place to protect that increasingly fragile and crystal-cut thing that he calls a heart.

“When do you leave?” Aziraphale is asking, and his voice is a quiet thing.

There’s a wall, yes, but also a telephone wire running beneath it, a landline to cling to.

“Day after next,” he says.

What they have is an understanding. They have an agreement, yes, and an arrangement, yes, and whatever this careful eyed thing that Aziraphale gives him across sofas and wine glasses, dinners and near-dates. They share pleasures, they always have— and it had been Aziraphale to offer up the first of them: oysters in Rome, and then a blanket in Wessex.

It seems normal, in retrospect, that they would evolve into sharing pleasures of a different kind.

“Then, perhaps we should—” Aziraphale is suddenly rather wiggly about the shoulders, flushing a bit around his ears, “finish up?”

And Aziraphale evolves in the way that the scientists say that plants do, that animals do. Over thousands of years and millions of copulations. After hundreds of dinner dates and many cups of tea. A shift one millimeter to the left every ten years. A movement so tiny you might miss it if you blink.

Crowley quirks an eyebrow at him.

“Are you in a rush?” He asks, and watches the tilt of Aziraphale’s throat as he finishes off his wine.

“I’d rather not be,” Aziraphale says, and his eyes are as wide as the moon.

* * *

He had bought him strawberries. They are in a green carton in his refrigerator.

Crowley is blinking and trying to steel himself— trying to hold onto something other than what is currently happening.

Aziraphale is in his bedroom. His bedroom where he has never been before— with its wide bed and tall windows, the long-lived ferns that are the descendants of the one that he had stared at from that bed nearly seventy-years ago.

Aziraphale’s waistcoat is already on the chair in the corner and Crowley’s heart is in his throat.

“How long will you be gone?”

The question hangs in the air and Crowley nearly doesn’t answer it because there is suddenly the stretch of Aziraphale’s shoulders in a blue cotton shirt, bisected by the indent of suspenders and a soft waist— the convex shapes of where he fills out his trousers, the divots where he doesn’t.

“Uh, a few months. Three, maybe.”

“Perhaps I could… visit you.”

Aziraphale turns his head and the sharp point of his nose is backlit by the window, the city lights glowing along his edges.

“That’d be nice,” Crowley says, and barely recognizes that he’s said it.

“You could take me to lunch,” he is saying, and Crowley can see him unbuttoning his shirt, that fair fluffy head dipping as his hands work down his front. “Point out to me your wiles.”

Crowley is frozen where he stands, barefoot and maybe a bit cold, the warmth of the wine in his belly dissipating by the second.

“Yeah,” he says, “you could thwart me.”

He shrugs the suspenders off his shoulders. The shirt comes down and Aziraphale turns around and there he is— an angel in an undershirt in his bedroom. Every inch of him _glows_ — his skin catching the muted light of so many buildings through the rain on his window and casting it back, ever faithful.

There is an orange stretch of light from the kitchen bending around the door, just enough to see the color of Aziraphale’s shirt on the chair, the shell-white cotton of his hair. Crowley has half a mind to ask if Aziraphale would like a light on— something so that Crowley’s doesn’t have to be the one with the sole burden of sight.

But then Aziraphale is in front of him, suddenly close, and Crowley thinks that perhaps the angel likes it this way— that the dark makes him easier to touch.

“I _could_ ,” Aziraphale agrees, and Crowley watches the sharp stab of fondness and friendship shoot across his eyes as he says it.

There will be no kisses. There will be no wedding ring. He reminds himself of it again and again. There will be no singular house, no home. There will not be a garden, not again. He will not ever behold the privilege of Aziraphale’s clutter, his perpetual anxiety, his frustrating fussiness. He should take what he can get and be grateful for it.

“You should,” Crowley says, but he’s speaking to himself.

 _Be grateful_.

“I _should_ ,” Aziraphale agrees, and Crowley suddenly cannot help himself. He is reaching for the hem of that undershirt and ripping it up, off the narrow shoulders and the fluffed curls. He is tugging at the button of his trousers, head bowed down between them.

“ _Crowley_ ,” Aziraphale says, and stills his hands.

“Yeah?” Crowley breathes, and looks up.

Their faces are very, _very_ close. He can smell the wine on his breath and the bit of basil that Aziraphale kept snacking on as they cooked. The mint of it, the green.

He wants to reach into that mouth and find the traces of it, the bits of it left on his tongue.

“Slow?” Aziraphale asks breathlessly, and there is the emotional kickback like a shotgun blast.

 _You go too fast for me_.

“Fuck, sorry.”

He takes a step back, drops his hands.

“No, I—“ Aziraphale is reaching out for him, blinking wildly, “I didn’t mean— don’t just—“

He pauses and swallows and the entire line of his chest moves as he does so.

“ _Don’t stop_.”

“You—“ Crowley runs his tongue around his teeth, realizes he doesn’t know where to put his hands when they aren’t on Aziraphale. “You’re gonna have to tell me,” he swallows, tries to clear his throat, “what to do.”

Aziraphale is nodding in the dark, his eyes wide and his breathing uneven.

“Okay,” he licks his lips, sucks the bottom one into his mouth. He looks deep in thought for a moment, his eyes flicking back and forth as if reading an invisible book. “New Jersey,” he says.

Crowley blinks at him, unsure for an entire half second— before he moves forward again, rests an unsteady hand on his hip.

“New Jersey,” he repeats, because he isn’t sure what this language is that they’re speaking but he thinks he might be able to learn.

“Yes,” Aziraphale says, and finally meets his eyes, “if— if you wouldn’t mind.”

“You mean—“ he is pulling at the trousers again, slower this time, more space and more gravity between them. “You want me to—“

“ _Yes_ ,” Aziraphale interrupts him and even in the dim light Crowley can see the fine flush of blood beneath the skin on his cheeks. He wants to suck on it. “Unless you don’t— you know. That’d be quite alright. I shouldn’t assume that you’d—“

“How many times?” Crowley asks, and it sounds like a growl, “you’re so clever how can you not understand?” He pushes the trousers off, _off_ , down to the floor and Aziraphale over to the bed. He divides the black of his sheets into distinct negative spaces— those with beauty and those without. “I told you _anytime_.”

Aziraphale is shivering, _faintly_ , a fine-boned tremor that starts somewhere with his breath and echoes down into his chest.

“You’re sure?” He is asking, as if Crowley isn’t already kneeling at the end of the bed, lining his supple hips up at the edge of it, wedging himself between them.

“The most sure,” he mumbles into a thigh, lifting it up and pushing it back.

There are those fine white lines striping across the inside of his legs— like veins of quartz in a cliffside— and he flattens his tongue against them, butts a nose into their beauty. Aziraphale is like cloud vapor and stardust, softness and strength. His fingers sink into the plush of him, pull those hips up to meet his mouth.

There are four chambers to a human heart, he knows. Reptiles have three. And Crowley isn’t sure exactly how many he has, three or four or maybe eight— but he knows that Aziraphale exists in each one.

“ _Crowley_ ,” his voice is a gasping, breathless thing, “why is this so good?”

The question kicks him in the chest but he ignores the ache there. The gasping of those chambers. He licks a line up the hard column on the underside of his cock, traces his tongue along the veins.

“Don’t ask questions, angel,” he mutters, and sucks the tip of him into his mouth.

Aziraphale arches back, and he can’t see it— not really— but Crowley likes to imagine that the soft curls of his hair are mussed into his cotton sheets, that perhaps the scent of him will get impressed there.

He pulls back, replaces his mouth with a hand, and sucks a line of kisses down the crease of his thigh.

“Good?” He murmurs into the skin behind his balls.

“Yes,” Aziraphale breathes, “ _very_.”

Crowley mutters a very brief, “ _K_ ,” before flattening his tongue across his entrance, lathing at him in earnest.

“ _Oh_ ,” Aziraphale is making that familiar sort of high-pitched subvocal sound, his hips shifting around on the bed.

Crowley wraps his free arm around his thigh, pulls it up tight to his face.

He’s moaning into him, sucking French kisses against his skin and opening him up on his tongue. Aziraphale is warm and thick and so very _alive_ underneath his mouth— responsive beyond words.

“Oh darling, _yes_ ,” Aziraphale is rocking up minutely into his fist, back down onto his tongue, “you feel so good.”

There is a pathetic sort of whimper coming out of Crowley’s throat, some sound he is incapable of denying. His cock flushed up hard against his leg, still trapped in the black denim of his trousers.

“Crowley.”

He can barely hear him, those soft white thighs strung up around his ears and his head buried between them.

“ _Crowley_ ,” he says it again, insistent and moaning and there is suddenly a hand in Crowley’s hair, twisting softly.

He looks up to find himself held in the shifting green-blue of Aziraphale’s unwavering gaze.

“Two?”

The question is so quiet he has a moment where he believes he imagined it, and then his brain processes the sound, the movement of his lips.

He exhales an unsteady stream of profanity and then pulls away, digs hurriedly into the table at his bedside.

There’s the sound of a tube opening, the inelegant squeezing of lubricant in the dark.

He can feel Aziraphale shifting back and forth on the bed and looks up, to catch the intensely dark flush of blood in his cheeks, the tips of his ears entirely red.

Aziraphale is blinking at him owlishly in the dark and Crowley is suddenly flush with something perhaps like shyness.

They are breathing back and forth in amazed silence, as if the sudden reality of what they are doing has sunk in.

“Why do you have—“ Aziraphale blinks and then flushes and swallows his sentence. Crowley can feel his pulse in his neck, the push of blood through his veins.

“What do you…?” Aziraphale, as if incapable of denying curiosity, rephrases his question, bites off the end.

Crowley looks down at his hand with the clear liquid on his fingers and then back up to Aziraphale’s earnest face.

“I use it,” he starts, “on… myself. Sometimes. Inside. You know.”

He is oddly grateful for the shirt on his back, grateful that it might be hiding the furious movement of his heart.

“You do?”

Aziraphale is looking at him like he never considered that Crowley would be interested in that level of pleasure. As if insertions were somehow on par with eating and since he hadn’t witnessed Crowley do much of the latter he mustn’t be a fan of the former.

Crowley edges back between Aziraphale’s thighs, presses a kiss against his knee.

“I do,” he murmurs, and then presses a finger against the tight skin of his entrance, “and I think about you.”

Aziraphale drops his head back and punches out a moan, his hands grabbing at the underside of his knees and pulling them open. He is rolling his hips down onto those fingers, his back arching off the bed.

“Fucking hell, angel,” Crowley breathes, and grinds his free hand down against the ache in his cock.

He twists his hand, adds a finger— searching— finds Aziraphale’s cock with his mouth again.

“ _Fuck_.”

The sound of Aziraphale’s lips wrapping around that syllable cut through the quiet of his flat.

Crowley pulls back and looks up at him, tries to bite down on the smile on his lips.

Aziraphale tilts his head up and stares at him and Crowley can see the flick of his eyes moving down to stare at his teeth, at his smile, at the obvious happiness there.

“Yes, _fine_ — _fuck_ — I said it,” he bites out, and lets his head fall back, “keep going.”

“I love it when you’re bossy,” Crowley murmurs, licking at the salt of him, and swallows him down again.

“I’ll—“ Aziraphale gasps out and rolls his hips down, _up_ , into and off of him— “remember that.”

Crowley just moans around him in response, milking him with his throat.

He wants to memorize the suck and pull of him— curl up inside that softness, that strength. Get lost in the warmth there. There will be no kisses— there will be no wedding ring— but this, Crowley thinks, curling his fingers like he is saying _come here—_ this is _good too._

The noise Aziraphale makes is somewhere between unholy and divine, straddling _just right_ and _too much_ , and the ache between his legs is suddenly unbearably _close_.

“Fuck,” he breathes, pulling back and pressing his suddenly sweaty forehead into the skin of Aziraphale’s thigh.

Aziraphale props himself up on his elbows, peers down at him between his knees.

“You okay?” He pants out, and Crowley looks up to see those white curls fluffed out in every direction, his cheeks flushed and glowing and looking both cherubic and mysterious, debauched and divine. 

“ _Very_ ,” Crowley echoes back at him, and presses the heel of his palm against the hard line in his clothes.

He glances down and can see a very distinct dark circle where he has leaked out an embarrassing amount of fluid.

“Oh, my dear— I’ve been— I’m sorry, I—“

Aziraphale is sitting up away from him suddenly, pulling himself off of those fingers and pushing himself up with his hands. His bare feet fall down to the floor.

“Can I just—?” Aziraphale is reaching for him, eyes searching his face, “can I taste you?”

Crowley has realized by now that Aziraphale’s oral fixation extends not only to food and the cigarettes he claims not to smoke, but also to Crowley’s cock, his fingers, any bit of skin he can fit in his mouth. Crowley hopes, in some other dimension perhaps— some parallel universe— that it also extends to his lips.

“Really?” Crowley breathes, fumbling at his button, his zipper. He gets unsteadily to his feet, rips his shirt one-handed off his back and over his head.

“Oh, yes. _Please_.”

He is suddenly cradled by Aziraphale’s bare thighs, by his hands up on his hips. His jeans are still on— loose and clinging to the bones of his legs, sticking to him with sweat.

He stares down and watches Aziraphale reach a gentle hand inside his trousers, pull out the length of him.

He can hear a very faint, “ _beautiful_ ,” before that neat mouth closes around him and his breath leaves his lungs.

“Oh _Christ_ , angel,” he bites out, “you feel so _fucking_ good.”

Crowley laces his hands around the back of his neck, through his cotton-tuft hair, dips them around his ears.

He bites his tongue because the word _love_ is going to come spilling out if he doesn’t. The resulting string of syllables is subvocal and non-english, some made-up guttural language of sounds and unfiltered emotion. Something ancient maybe, something unhinged.

Aziraphale catches it, learns it, echoes it back around his sex in his mouth. The vibration runs down the length of him, runs straight into his bones.

“Fuck, _fuck,_ ” he bites it out and pushes back at those bare shoulders in warning, “Angel— I might—“

Aziraphale pulls reluctantly off of him, staring at that place his mouth had just been with something like hunger, like thirst.

Crowley huffs out a gasp at the sudden shock of cold air on his wet skin, Aziraphale looking up at him with wide, suddenly emboldened eyes.

“Crowley,” he says, and very slowly and deliberately leans onto his back.

Crowley watches the movement as if it is happening in slow motion— catching the grace of Aziraphale’s forearm as it comes down, as hehooks his hands around his thighs, just under those fuzzy pale knees.

Crowley can see him— _all_ of him— his eyes and his heart and the shine of the slickness still between his legs. Aziraphale licks his lips and Crowley’s eyes get caught in the wetness there, the endless depth. His knees fall a little further open and that chest shudders beneath an unsteady breath, “fuck me?”

He can feel it when the blood leaves his face, he can feel it when his heart stops beating.

“ _What_?”

There is something on Aziraphale’s face that looks rather like annoyance, like the times when his food took too long to be delivered and he was on the fringes of asking for a comp.

“ _Crowley_ ,” Aziraphale is shifting on his black sheets, crumpling them beneath his back. “Please?”

“Oh. _Fucking_ hell. Are you sure?”

There’s no coming back from this, he knows. Not that there has been a coming back from _any_ of this. 

“ _Yes_.”

His heart restarts and is suddenly too loud— too furious— he fumbles in the dark and palms that bottle again, squeezes out another inelegant liquid sound.

He reaches down and slicks it over himself, resists the urge to give in to the pleasures of his own hand.

There is a guttural moan and he glances up, between his long bangs, to see Aziraphale shifting and biting his lip.

 _Fucking hell_ , he thinks, because Aziraphale _wants him—_ sexually at least— and he has yet to build a tolerance to the thrill of that high.

He kneels up on the bed, gentles Aziraphale back until they both fit.

“This ok?” He breathes, and guides those lovely thighs around his hips.

Aziraphale is nodding and panting, his ribcage expanding and contracting and Crowley has to pull his eyes away from the rhythmic beauty of it, has to guide his eyes down to his own cock in his own hand, pressing against Aziraphale’s entrance.

“Yes, oh darling— that’s good—“

Aziraphale is babbling and moaning and Crowley tries to focus on that instead of the furious suck of his own lungs, the terrible sound of his own labored breathing.

There’s far more resistance than he thought there’d be and he has a sudden stab of regret— of not having taken enough time on him— and the sudden ache of _you go too fast for me_ echoes up from somewhere in his spine.

He squeezes his eyes shut and stops, holds himself very still.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale gasps, “ _don’t stop_.”

He opens his eyes again and finds Aziraphale’s beneath him, finds the trust there, the honesty.

There will be no kisses.

He closes his eyes again, breathes, opens them. He wraps a hand around Aziraphale’s cock, strokes him through the insertion.

Aziraphale nods, once, and Crowley holds his breath, sinks all the way inside.

He had thought about it— of course he had— for decades and maybe longer, had fantasized about it in every possible scenario. But he had never understood the true wonder it would be— how deep he could go.

Aziraphale is everywhere— softness and strength— holding him tightly.

“Are you okay?” He manages around the spectacular shivering of his muscles, everywhere. “Does it hurt?”

 _Do I hurt_? He wants to ask.

He holds himself exactly still, vibrating with the pleasure of Aziraphale and nothing else.

“Just— ah, a bit bigger than I thought,” Aziraphale is managing to speak around the shallow panting of his chest.

“Fuck, sorry— should I—?” He’s ready to pull out and stop everything and wrap Aziraphale up in a blanket, banish his cock away to some far-away planet.

“ _No_ ,” a bit of the Principality in Aziraphale comes out just then, a bit of the holy power.

Crowley settles down on his ankles, angles Aziraphale’s hips up into his lap with both hands.

“Just tell me when,” he murmurs, and wishes he had that neck to breathe into, those lips to fall inside.

He would hold himself forever like this if that’s what Aziraphale wants. He would turn those valves in his heart to mechanical pistons, the chambers into cylinders. Motor oil in his blood stream and grease on his hands. His whole chest an engine block to serve him better. _Whatever you want. Let me give it to you. Don’t look under the hood._

“Okay,” Aziraphale breathes, “yeah, just go slow.”

He can hear it in his voice all over again.

 _You go too fast for me_.

“Is— Is this good?” It is somehow difficult to move his hips like this and speak, to move like this and take in every bit of Aziraphale beneath him— those watercolor eyes fluttering shut with nearly every stroke, his mouth open and slick and making those sounds around his name.

He has a mindless, gnawing desire to go fast, to fuck and take and anchor his hands above his shoulders, give him something solid to push into. The pleasure is maddeningly slow— his body strung tight along the edge of orgasm already despite the frustrating lack of movement. 

But then Aziraphale bites out a moan on a particularly slow stroke and he lets the ache of withholding shiver down his back, boil at the base of his spine.

“More.” Aziraphale’s eyes are closed and his hands are fisting in the sheets, head turned to the side until the soft line of his jaw is angled up at him in the dark. He wants to bite it, kiss it, suck it into his mouth.

“ _More_.” His voice is insistent this time, louder— and Crowley snaps his hips up, obedient.

“Harder,” he gasps out, and Crowley squeezes his eyes shut, tries to hold onto the fraying edge of control and pleasure, tries to focus on something other than the terrifying softness of Aziraphale from the inside.

He chances a glance down, between them, to the slick point of their junction, and then rips out a moan— falls down on his hands above those shoulders.

He flexes his hips into him, _once_ , and the angle of his thrusts must be different because Aziraphale ripples out a sound of incongruous harmony, suddenly squeezes his legs around Crowley’s hips.

“ _Crowley_.”

It sounds as though there isn’t air in Aziraphale’s lungs, his name on his lips strung together solely out of desperation.

“Angel, _angel_ ,” he is panting and moaning and flexing into him, “oh fuck. Oh _fuck_. S’this good? Tell me it’s good.”

Aziraphale’s head is thrown back against the sheets, twisting in the black. There is something like a nod— his mouth dropped open and moaning.

He bites down hard on his lip and sets the rhythm, marvels at Aziraphale matching it— thrust for thrust, rising and falling— like riding a horse, like a ship on the sea.

Aziraphale is mindless and desperate beneath him— around him— clenching and rolling until pleasure becomes less an end-goal and more an improbable reality— something to endure and outlast.

He reaches an unsteady hand down between them again, wraps up the silken hardness of Aziraphale in his palm.

“Come,” he gasps out desperately, nearly a command, “please, angel, _come_.”

“Yes, oh yes, just there— _more_ — _oh_.”

The world becomes a pinpoint of pleasure between them— doubled on the beginning of Aziraphale’s orgasm, sucked up tight in the flex of his muscles.

“Oh _fucking_ hell—“ Aziraphale’s voice on the profanity uncharacteristically cracks, “ _Crowley_.”

He moves through it, angling his hips to hit that spot that makes Aziraphale gasp— over and over in repetitious perfection until there is a cataclysmic squeezing of his muscles, a striping of hot liquid across his chest and a moan that he will be able to recall in his dreams.

Crowley blinks down at him in sustained amazement— and then Aziraphale opens his eyes, half-lidded and dazed, licks his lips.

“Your turn,” he breathes, and rolls his hips up to meet him.

“Oh,” Crowley drops his head down between his shoulders, squeezes his eyes closed, “ _fuck.”_

There is sweat rolling down his spine— evidence of his withholding— and hands suddenly on his back, near his hips, digging into his skin beneath his jeans.

“Yes, _yes_ — come on, darling, you can do it—“

It feels like every inch of him is on fire— trembling and shivering— Aziraphale slick and eager and open underneath of him, those finely boned hands guiding his hips.

“Oh, you’re _beautiful_.”

Crowley, with his eyes closed tightly and his pulse too loud in his ears, would consider later that he must have imagined hearing that.

“That’s it, that’s so good—“

Aziraphale’s voice is the sound of infinite patience, of unconditionality— like he would endure this animal rutting into him without question, would accept the terrible sounds he is making, would drink the sweat rolling off his skin.

“Aziraphale—“

“Crowley.”

There is a command in the way he says his name and Crowley opens his eyes, locks them on Aziraphale’s below him.

The angel is nodding and glowing and biting at his lip, his hands coming up to cradle Crowley’s face, his jaw— pushing back the sweat-dampened sway of his bangs.

He nods up at him, encouraging and patient, and Crowley thinks wildly that he could never be anything but an angel to him— even if he fell.

“ _Come_ ,” Aziraphale breathes, and squeezes his thighs around his hips.

For a shuddering stretch of time there is no fear, no doubt, no desperation born of longing— just raw, unfiltered pleasure carrying him through to oblivion. An orgasm so sustained it bordered on pain.

He would realize later that there had been a single held sound coming out of his throat— that Aziraphale had angled his hips up to meet his final erratic thrusts. He would realize that he had bitten his bottom lip so hard that it actually ripped the skin open and dripped down onto Aziraphale’s cheek.

“My dear,” Aziraphale is saying, after an unknown length of time has passed, “you’re trembling.”

Crowley peels apart his eyes, looks down to that spot of blood on Aziraphale’s cheek.

“Yeah,” he breathes, wholly unsteady, “I am.”

Aziraphale swipes his thumb across the red on his own cheek, sucks it into his mouth.

“So am I,” he says.

Crowley lifts off— pulls back— before he can sink any closer to that neat mouth, those clever lips. He leans back on his ankles and pulls himself free of Aziraphale, trying not to look at the mess he has made of the angel.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, and yanks up his jeans, realizing dimly that he had fucked Aziraphale through the fly of them like some sort of human teenager— fumbling in the backseat of a car.

He disappears across the hall— to his bathroom, feeling the blood flowing back into his legs, his feet— the remainder of his limbs.

Aziraphale has straightened— somewhat— on his return, his thighs held demurely together.

“Come on,” Crowley says, and kneels on the bed next to him, “let me clean you up.”

There is a new and wonderful shade of pink blooming on Aziraphale’s face in the dark— a different one from the pink of exertion.

“Oh— really?”

It is the same _oh really?_ Of three hundred years ago— of a miracle at the Globe. The sound tickles in his ears, sends goosebumps down the length of his spine.

“Yeah,” he breathes, “let me clean up my mess.”

Aziraphale rolls slowly back onto his elbows, shyly parts the white of his thighs.

It is somehow more intimate than being inside of him— the sound of warm towel on skin and the hitched breathing of Aziraphale in the dark setting the molecules in his bloodstream skittering into butterflies. A sort of reckless emotion buoyed up on this secret they would carry between them forever.

“Thank you,” Aziraphale says, when it’s all over, “what’s for dessert?”

* * *

Later, when Aziraphale is on that sofa and wrapped up in a blanket, Crowley brings him the strawberries.

They are those miracle-in-the-middle-of-winter berries. The how-do-these-exist-in-a-city berries. He washes them and they eat them out of the little green carton. They deposit their leafy green hats in a pile on the coffee-table.

The end of that movie is playing out silently on the television. Aziraphale wrinkles his nose at the old priest and the broken window, he looks away at the blood stains on the screen.

“It’s not real,” Crowley says, and wants to put his arm around him.

“I know,” Aziraphale replies but doesn’t look up, “I’d still rather not see it.”

He can’t stay— Crowley knows he can’t— it would be too much time away from his self-imposed designated location. It would draw too much attention. Aziraphale is anxious at the best of times. He won’t push him for this. There will be no toothbrushes kissing in the same sink-side cup.

Aziraphale lingers too long at the door, frets something about not having helped clean up.

“Don’t worry about it,” Crowley says, “it’s nothing.”

This is the part, Crowley thinks, where they would kiss. But there will be no kisses, he reminds himself. There will be no wedding ring.

He brushes a hand across the shoulder of Aziraphale’s coat instead, remembers the smell of him there.

“Be careful,” he says, an echo of earlier times, “getting home.”

Aziraphale smiles over his shoulder at him, “ _Careful_ is my last name.”

Crowley cannot explain why there is a lump in his throat and why it will not dissipate when he swallows. He cannot explain the greedy suck of the chambers of his heart, the way they ache despite having eaten what should have been their fill.

He walks back into his messy kitchen, after he’s gone— eyes the basil, the strawberries, the mortifying jar he could not open.

There is Aziraphale’s wine glass perched on a cutting board, the stamp of his lips impressed upon the edge. He lifts it curiously to eye level, and then presses his mouth against the stain.

* * *

_Berlin_

He misses the spring every winter— always has— but this time it is the spring from sixty years ago. The spring when he was standing on a boardwalk on another continent, breathing in salt air and knowing he was about to go home, about to see a familiar face in a familiar city.

How many nights had he spent sleeping next to Aziraphale’s jacket? How many days did he return home to a seaside hotel and breathe in the smell that was locked up in the collar?

He had brought it back to him and hung it up on the coatrack in the bookshop as if it hadn’t been a life-raft for him then. As if it had been no more remarkable than an item of practicality to keep him warm over a cold winter in a strange place. As if that coat was just a coat and not the thing he came home to in the evenings, a placeholder for a person.

But he has no placeholder now, no jacket, no Aziraphale. He has a tiny hotel room in a desolate part of town, he has orders from below in a paper missive on the desk. He has temptations to perform and an ache in his knees.

It isn’t spring, not yet, but maybe soon.

He can see the wall from outside of his window. He can see the barbed wire top and the guard tower looming. He can see graffiti stamped down on every available inch of it. Some of it legible, some of it not.

There is one particular bit of it that is framed by his window when he lies on the bed.

_Zeit heilt gar nichts._

He goes outside sometimes, just to go for walks. He likes to stomp out his cigarettes on the ground and pretend like he isn’t going to pick them up, but he always does.

He waits, mostly. In between temptations and petty biddings for Hell. He waits and looks over his should a lot and drinks his dinners. There’s corn in bourbon, he tells himself, and he counts it as a vegetable.

At night he lies in bed and stares at the ceiling and can see that bit of graffiti from his window. He learns, eventually, that it says _time doesn’t heal anything_ , and it hurts and heals him in equal measure every time he sees it.

He gets good at fucking his own fist and thinks about how maybe it was easier before he knew what it felt like to be inside Aziraphale, how maybe it didn’t hurt so fucking much.

But this is it, he knows. There will be no kisses on the lips, there will be no wedding ring. He gets used to that weight and pulls it on like a jacket. Like a placeholder for a real thing. It’s enough, he tells himself. It’s enough.

There will be no singular home, he knows. There will not be another garden. But perhaps he can learn not to need it. Perhaps what they have— the intimacy of being _de facto_ lovers and the completion of being enemies, _de jure_ — is enough, like they are the two halves of an incomplete whole.

He closes his eyes and adds another brick on the wall that says _it won’t heal_ , and tells himself that he’s okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big thank you to [fadefaraway](https://fadefaraway.tumblr.com) for the impromptu German lesson and handling that translation for me! 
> 
> I'm trying to get better at responding to comments but I am also very soft and very scared haha if I don't reply please know that I love them so very very much.


	6. resurrection stone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I owe the biggest debt of gratitude to [rfsmiley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rfsmiley/pseuds/rfsmiley) for polishing this turd into something readable and then to [nerdythangs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerdythangs) for the last-minute spit-shine. These are two of the finest humans out there <3 It's been a pleasure screaming with y'all. 
> 
> chapter notes: did I write over 100k words just to let my own personal headcanon of what happens in the show exist? YEAH. I have a tag that says, "this is just a redux of episode 3: Hard Times". and, yeah. This is that. Sorry in advance. Here there be dragons and all that.

It had been a Tuesday night sometime in the month after Christmas— with snow still on the streets and colored electric lights festooning shop fronts all through Soho.

“Christmas decorations have the shelf-life of fish,” Crowley had said that afternoon, “they stink two days later.”

They had gone back to the bookshop and Crowley had stood there in his ripped jeans and his long hair, had asked him if he wanted to have dinner.

“You can cook?” Aziraphale had asked, and had immediately felt bad.

They had set the time and had set the place— Crowley’s, and Aziraphale had spent too much time fussing with his hair, too much time worrying about his clothes.

He had shown up at his flat in the pouring rain and Crowley had opened the door in that irritated and tightly-strung way, had slung a hand through his hair and and a barb through his voice— _you could’ve just come in_ — and walked him into the cold modern strangeness of his flat.

He had changed it, _profoundly_ — where before it had been dark, cold, _stone_ — It had then been white, warm, _bright_. There was furniture where previously there hadn’t been. A sofa that was white and leather and squared off boxes of technology packed along the wall.

Aziraphale had stood and stared and regretted not having seen his home in every iteration. Had regretted not being there to witness all its shapeshifting.

Crowley had made pasta, simple enough, and had cursed when he couldn’t open the jar. Aziraphale had just smiled and opened it and stole glances at his hands, at the bony wrists and the long fingers. He had noticed the depths of his nail beds as he pulled basil leaves off the stem, had caught the easy slide of his eyes across his wrist as he stirred.

Crowley had been quiet then— an edge was there that hadn’t been before. It had taken most of a bottle of wine and the near kiss of their feet on the floor to learn that he was leaving— soon— and would miss nearly the entirety of that winter.

The edge of that coming loneliness had burned, it _still_ burned, and he had finished his wine so that they could finish in the kitchen.

Later, in the dark, in that bedroom, he had smelled like the good wine they’d had at dinner and also basil, wood smoke, match-heads striking against cardboard. Like desert-winds and distant bonfires— he had smelled like years of longing, like shared cigarettes, like disbelief.

If it hadn’t been so new it would’ve been bad— a hundred misstepped movements, indecision and uncertainty painting every brush of their hands, neither of them knowing what they were doing.

Crowley had shivered and sweated and held himself so tightly strung that Aziraphale had been able to count the tendons in his neck, had been able to watch the moment those vertical pupils blew wide in the dark. There had been so much effort involved in keeping himself together— in making it last, in making it _good_ — that the fern on the window sill had started shaking, the window panes had rattled with more than just the rain. 

He had been so close— an arm’s length away— and that bottom lip had been pulled in between teeth and bitten when it should have been pressed up against his own.

There had been rapture on his face, between Aziraphale’s hands, as he had cupped the bones of his cheeks, the cradle of his jaw, and tried to catch the stuttering, disbelieving movement of Crowley between his legs, finally letting go.

He had muttered an apology after it was all over, had disappeared out of the room and Aziraphale had felt an abrupt panic that maybe it had been too much— he had pushed him too far, too fast. And then he had returned with a towel and a shy smile, had done a very professional job of cleaning him up.

Aziraphale had wanted to tell him that he would walk home with Crowley running down his legs and wouldn’t be ashamed, would be _proud_ even. He had wanted to tell him that he liked the idea of being painted in his colors.

But he hadn’t. Because of course Crowley could feel it. Of course he would know that much already.

So instead he had said thank you, and had asked for dessert.

Later, walking home, Aziraphale had thought that he would feel different— sullied maybe, or changed somehow. Irrevocably altered. The voice of God and Her holy book was writ on the underside of the skin he wore and he had understood that night, walking home, that the mythos of sodomy and sexual penetration had been a carefully constructed pyramid of falsehoods and inadequacies. The word of them was all wrong.

He had not felt sullied and he had not felt altered. He felt, instead, _light_.

Jubilant even— as if when Crowley left his body he took some of that burden with him, transmuted it into something _good_. Something gold. A bit of alchemy between them.

And maybe he had— because he had left and Crowley had stood and watched him leave and Aziraphale had felt the pulsating burn of the demon’s emotion through the door, across the threshold, long after it had closed.

He had felt it for three city blocks, maybe longer— around bends and alleyways, blanketing his skin. A sweater he never wanted to take off. Air he would never tire of breathing. A bath he would sink into and never get out of.

He had walked through that early spring humidity, that late-winter chill— through the puddles and the depleted snow banks— a soreness between his legs and an ache between his ribs. He had gone home to his bookshop, had drawn up a bath in that tiled room that held so much of their shared history, and had hoped that Crowley, across town, was bathing in his love too.

* * *

_2008_

He had felt it, somehow— walking down the street. A shift in the direction of the wind, the way it brushed through his hair. A finely honed edge of adrenaline lining up beneath his skin.

There is that burn of coming loneliness— as if sometime soon Crowley will be leaving him again.

But it is an absurd thought— and he tries not to dwell on the bitterness in the back of his throat. Tries to focus instead on the human in front of him, beyond that bamboo counter.

He watches the slide of blade, the rolling of rice— feels instead the nag of unease, the stretch of tension.

He had seen Crowley that morning— surely he would have said something if he were leaving. Surely somewhere between first cups of coffee and half of a shared cigarette he would have mentioned it. And then later— _after_ — after he had pinned him up against a bookshelf between Descartes and Foucault— after he had sucked until Crowley’s knees went weak and Aziraphale had been forced to hold him up with a hand on his hip. The entire weight of him in one palm and a mouthful in the other. Surely _then_ , crumpled on the floor and moaning about the dirty floor he would have told him.

He still has scratches on the back of his neck where Crowley’s fingers had dug in just a bit too tight, and he shifts his shoulders back and forth in his clothes.

He feels heat across his cheeks in memory and he breathes in the scent of his food, desperate for a distraction— when he feels the heralding tingling of someone miracling up beside him.

He turns to the left— ready to whisper his thanks that Crowley has somehow always been able to sense his unease— ready to slide his palm out and a chair out and offer him food he most definitely will not eat.

But Crowley is not there. And he sees instead in the reflective surface to his left the tightly-controlled smile of Gabriel.

It is as an unpleasant surprise as any to have him at his elbow.

“I like the clothes,” he is saying, violet eyes flashing defensive, and then, “pity they won’t be around much longer.”

There is that feeling like a stone sinking through liquid. A rock dropped into a lake and disappearing into the dark. The cold burn of coming loneliness.

 _Armageddon_.

He did not need to say it. Aziraphale should have known already— by the twisting of the wind as he walked down the street, the smell of the desert on its back.

Perhaps that is why Crowley had spent the previous night lying half on and half off his backroom sofa, passed out after too much wine and too many conversations. Perhaps that is why he had sucked Aziraphale off earlier that evening as he stood upright braced against the stove— the teakettle going off and Aziraphale with it.

Aziraphale had held his long hair fisted at the base of his spine, had marveled at the shine of the sunbeams on it through the window.

Perhaps they had both known, somehow, that the hourglass was down near empty— a handful of grains left to fall. Time running thin.

“My informant suggests that the demon Crowley may be involved,” Gabriel says, “you need to keep him under observation without, of course, letting him know what you are doing.”

Aziraphale, thinking impossibly that this conversation is letting his sushi go cold, withholds the flush that is threatening to bloom— _don’t let the trick play out on your face_.

“It’s a miracle he hasn’t spotted you yet,” Gabriel says, and Aziraphale can acutely feel the heat of Crowley’s gaze across centuries broadcast on his skin— at Golgotha, before glasses, in Rome, across oysters, last week, in the dark.

This morning, he thinks, over coffee.

Crowley had spotted him six-thousand years ago.

He laughs, nervously, because he has to.

“Yes I know,” Gabriel says, “miracles are what we do.”

* * *

“Even if I wanted to help, I couldn’t,” Aziraphale is saying, too drunk and yet not enough.

Crowley is all angles on the sofa in front of him, sloppy and intoxicated and comfortable enough that he is pulling those glasses off, slinging them onto the cushion beside him.

That action will never not surprise him— will never not light a tiny fire between the bones of his chest. Those eyes that he guards half out of fear and half out of spite. He is comfortable, Aziraphale knows, to shed that barrier in the comfort of this backroom, on that couch where they have shed a multitude of skins.

And he wishes, maybe once, that he could be so brave.

“I can’t interfere with the Divine Plan,” he says, and stares down into his wine glass.

He can feel the breadth of the wind of Megiddo, rising up across the valley floor. He can smell the red of the sand. That hourglass. That small fire. The burn of coming loneliness.

_Together to the place called in Hebrew, Armageddon._

He closes his eyes against it. Against all of it. Time and fate. The inescapable pull of it.

“Well, what about diabolical plans?” Crowley is asking, none-the-wiser of his silent anxieties, of the fear that crawls and sticks in his throat. “See a wile, ya thwart.”

Aziraphale looks up at him, at his sitting on the arm of the sofa now— never content— always shifting. Crowley is a lesson in change, a masterclass of movement.

“It’s the upbringing that’s important. The influences,” he says. “The evil influences, that’s all going to be me.”

Crowley says it as if he has ever been evil, as if he has ever truly done anything out of malice. Humor and mischief are the bones that he stands on. There is not an evil one amongst them.

“It’d be too bad if someone made sure that I failed,” he says, and his eyes are white around the edges. He is concentrating, Aziraphale knows, to make them that way. To make himself soft, tolerable, drinkable. As if Aziraphale would not swallow him straight.

“Well,” Aziraphale says, and he can’t look away from him, “if you put it that way—“

“We’d be godfathers,” Crowley says, and there is something soft in the fall of his hair, the tilt of his mouth.

The winds of a conversation long ago lift up through the floorboards, through Aziraphale’s fingers. A moment in an ocean of prairie grass at midnight, near a crossroad. Staring at the stars, the _Ursa Minor_ , the _Polaris_ , the light that guides humans home.

 _Creating things, protecting them. Having a hand in the way things are shaped_.

He had said it and they had fallen down into the dirt in a tangle of nostalgia and loneliness. Aching for the ways things should have been.

Those same eyes, like those star-hearts, across from him in this quiet bookshop are saying the same thing— _I miss them. Having a hand in the way things are shaped_.

“Overseeing his upbringing.”

There would be no resisting him, not on this, not like he had resisted him for so long about so many other things— there is no time for that, not now. Crowley reaches out his hand, spans the time and the space between them.

“Godfathers,” Aziraphale says, and takes his outstretched palm, “well I’ll be damned.”

Crowley smiles at him then and pulls back, a smirk on his face and a light in his eye.

“It’s not so bad,” he says, because he has already seen the place where the lovers go, the place for the heretics, “once you get used to it.”

* * *

There had been a time then— in between. Bliss of the domestic sort. Crowley had pulled on female skin again, like he said he would, and had tended to the infantile needs of the Antichrist. A manor in the countryside. Days of tutoring and days of weeding.

There had been times where they would meet— the humble gardener and the severe nanny— out in the garden, perhaps. At afternoon tea. At holiday parties and birthday celebrations. Occasionally Crowley would bring him biscuits, and other times wine, and they would drink it beneath a heavy moon after Warlock had gone to sleep.

“It’s nice,” Aziraphale had said one summer night, sitting on the garden wall, “the domesticity.”

Crowley, who had never seemed like one to enjoy the peace and quiet— what with his loud music and his fast car and his tight outfits— had grunted at him in restrained agreement.

“I guess,” she had said, and kicked off her heeled shoes.

“Maybe we could—“ Aziraphale had stopped himself, nearly bitten his own tongue.

“Maybe we could…?” Crowley had asked, with a lifted copper eyebrow.

Aziraphale had not noticed when Crowley had removed the glasses— the small round ones that Nanny wore to protect the humans of the house from her eyes.

The air had smelled like moonflowers and jasmine— ivy creeping up the manor house walls and crepuscular insects singing their nighttime songs. Crowley’s eyes had shined then, in the dark, and there had been marks on her nose from the glasses that so rarely came off.

“Do it again,” Aziraphale had said, feeling that those golden eyes looked very right in the middle of a garden, up there on that wall, “the domestic thing. You know… Someday.”

Crowley had smiled then, the first real smile he had seen since they had started here, nanny and gardener. Two caretakers of a different sort.

“I could do with a bit of domesticity,” she had said, with feigned disinterest. But Aziraphale could see that wry mouth twisting up in a smile, and the coverlet of Crowley’s love that surrounded him grew warm.

* * *

_2019_

“Are you sure this is the right place?” Aziraphale is asking, because the Antichrist has gone missing and the days are counting down. They do not have time for mistakes. “This doesn’t look like a hospital.”

There is a strange sort of bubbling effervescence in the air— everywhere. Effusive and ticklish. It is spread out, spread thin. But still it blankets everything— the grass that Crowley is walking across, the gravel on the path beneath Aziraphale’s feet. He had felt it earlier— in the Bentley, a layer of something different on top of that emotion that Crowley has been exuding for centuries.

 _Love_ — different yes, but similar. A platonic love, like the one he’d felt going out to the cinema with Crowley, the one he’d felt reminiscing in the backroom of his bookshop. Friendship and joy locked up in memories. History between the bones of a place, the bones of a person.

And also an unconditional love, the one he’d feel beneath Crowley’s hands in the dark, the one he’d feel across morning cups of coffee with their feet touching beneath the table— a love that says, _I will live here, I will stay here_.

And all at once— like shaken carbonation or a cup that is too small— the emotion overflows, runs beyond the boundary of him. It runs out of his chest, bleeds all over his hands. He stops abruptly, incapable of walking when there is this much joy in the air, this much love in his heart.

“It— It feels loved,” he gasps, short of breath, and Crowley turns to look at him.

“No it’s definitely the place— “ he stops, looks confused, “what do you mean _loved_?”

It is stealing the breath in his lungs, he has not felt love of this magnitude since Crowley in the desert, since that night at his Mayfair flat.

Aziraphale is blinded and gasping by the joy in his chest, in his heart. Nearly panicking with the magnitude of it all.

“It— I mean the opposite of when you say, _I don’t like this place, it feels spooky_.”

Crowley looks personally affronted, “I don’t _ever_ say that, I like spooky. Big spooky fan, me.”

Aziraphale inhales, tries to shake out the tingling of his hands, his arms— the warmth that runs through his veins. It is layered on top of that which Crowley radiates and the weight of it is _exhausting_.

He flexes his hands, follows after him through those brick pillars towards the sound of chaos, gunfire, shouting. The significance of Crowley’s confusion is just beginning to bubble up to the surface, underneath that emotion, when he is suddenly struck in the back.

Crowley is too— in the front— and there is red across his chest. There is a single moment where Aziraphale’s heart stops— because they’ve been here before, and they don’t have time. There is not room in this moment for bullet-holes, for exit wounds. He does not have time to stitch him up, to carry him home.

“Blue?”

Crowley is looking at him and then at his own hand, at the red on his own chest. The color of it licks a line of fear up Aziraphale’s neck and then—

“Oh,” he says, “it’s paint.”

The fear gives over to confusion, and then relief. And he is probably looking at Crowley too long, probably staring a bit too hard at the shock of that color against his skin, down into the all-together too deep of a V on his shirt.

A human comes meandering toward them, armed and armored, and Aziraphale has half a moment of fear sticking in his throat at the silhouette of him— like so many soldiers before— so many days of Crowley filing off with them. Down into trenches, down into war zones.

He holds a hand over that shoulder, reaching for the blue, something to hold onto, and Crowley lets the skin over his face slip— just for a moment.

He can see fangs and scales there, teeth so large the tip of them crest nearly into those large and monstrous eyes. The edges of Crowley vibrate with the power of his favorite shape.

The human faints, predictably, and Aziraphale has to turn away, has to bite at his lip and close his eyes— find something else entirely to focus on or else—

“Well, that was fun,” Crowley says, and his face is beautiful with laughter.

“Fun for you,” Aziraphale says, trying to think of anything besides those scales, that laughter— they are in _public_ and they have a mission here. It has been less than forty-eight hours since he’s had Crowley inside him, bent over the bookshop counter with the register popping open— he shouldn’t be this undone over a bit of scale, a flash of fang.

He flexes his jaw and swallows back the heat and turns his shoulder to Crowley— the one that still bears bruises from the press of his teeth.

“But look at the state of this coat.”

Aziraphale thinking about it all later, would not be able to forget the way Crowley had leaned over, had wasted an entire miracle on blowing away the paint on his jacket, the way he had stared at him for a while after. He would not be able to forget Crowley kicking open doors and his swaggering bravado— they were on demonic turf, in that hospital, Aziraphale knew, and perhaps it had been those scales— those fangs— that made him slip up so completely for the first time in a long time. He had called Crowley _nice_.

And he would not be able to forget, nearly an hour later, the heat of Crowley’s anger in that moment— the press of hips on his against that wall. The kiss of their noses, the sudden proximity of their lips. He had stared at them for perhaps too long, had never been closer to just leaning forward— breaking their one silent, unspoken rule— and kissing him square on the mouth.

But he hadn’t, _barely_ , and perhaps it was because of the nearness of those lips that it took him so long to notice something that should’ve been obvious from the start. A persistent echoing of Crowley’s voice in his head— a turning over of one phrase in particular:

_What do you mean, loved?_

It is stuck there in the back of his mouth, between his teeth. He chews on it through the manor and back out again— past the police and past the ambulances.

He chews on it still getting into that car, and again while Crowley is driving too fast, careening around curves, lights off.

“There’s a very particular feeling to this whole area,” he says, nervous, trying to approach this delicately. “I’m astonished you can’t feel it.”

Crowley looks for all the world like he does not understand what he is talking about. Someone describing a color that doesn’t exist. A taste he has never encountered.

“I don’t feel anything out of the ordinary,” he says.

Aziraphale studies him out of the corner of his eye, cold sweat beginning strangely on the back of his neck, fear and unease lifting the hairs there to stand on end.

“But it’s everywhere,” he says, insistent. _He must feel it_ , he thinks. How could he not? “All over here,” he says. _Tell me you feel it_.

Crowley threads his eyebrows together and frowns, confused. Aziraphale concentrates hard on the profile of his face, allowing himself to fall in love all over again with the planes of it, the colors of it— the dark glasses and the bright hair and the aquiline cut of his nose. He must be swimming in it, _wading_ through it— Aziraphale is not withholding even an ounce of his desire, his attraction— the unconditional nature of it all.

He allows himself to remember their best of times, the ones when he could scarcely breathe— over a ruined churchyard, holding out a satchel of books; at his strange stony flat where he had been sleeping on the walls; in the backroom, on the sofa, a demon in his lap and collarbones between his teeth.

But Crowley just drives, like he always has— and Aziraphale understands, perhaps too slowly, and then all at once, that he has never felt the brush of his emotions at all.

There is that sudden drench of glacial cold in his veins, as realization comes slicking up his arteries. An iceberg carving landscapes across his insides.

It can’t be, he thinks, it _can’t_ be.

It cannot be that Crowley is immune to this feeling, to this ability. It cannot be that he is numb to the emotion that Aziraphale has been throwing at him for one-hundred years.

They are from the same stock. How could he have lost the ability to feel the most basic of emotions? How could Hell have removed such an intrinsic trait? He still has wings, he still has magic. He _must_ still have this.

There is a cresting tide of panic rising up through his stomach, his chest— across his heart and into his throat. He can’t breathe. It’s too much— he blinks away the water in his eyes, furious.

They’ve never said it, he thinks wildly. One hundred years since he has known what to call this thing between them— the requited nature of it all. He had carried Crowley in his arms across a desert and had been smiling, _smiling_ — because he could feel Crowley throwing up love into the universe like they were those stars he had made, like it was air, his own exhalations impossible of holding in. He had felt it on that flat rock in Spain at the beginning of the century— the first time he had put a name to the thing that he had always felt rolling off of him, even up there on that garden wall, the first time.

And this entire time— all of it— the long nights and their combined blood on their hands, the baths and the bruises and the nightmares, Crowley making him dinner and then making him love— Crowley saving him and then saving his books— pulling up the floorboards in his shop and hiding them beneath the timbers— Mother Shipton, Edgar Cayce, Madame Blavatsky. He had visited him across the ocean, had locked him up warm in his coat on an unfamiliar boardwalk and had thrown the emotion of the thing at him in gross and incalculable measure— so large and so dangerously, _dangerously_ loud that he had thought Heaven would drop down and smite him on the spot.

And all of it— Crowley reciting the Book of Genesis back at him as they walked home, Crowley in the desert of America holding him in the prairie grass, Crowley pressed up against him on the bog of Passchendaele— must have felt entirely one-sided.

He tries to breathe. He flexes his hands.

He can no longer feel his heart in his chest. There is nothing beating there anymore.

There is a strange emptiness that he can feel in the soles of his feet. A sudden sweep of nothing. That iceberg has carved out a glacial desert.

Crowley has not known— not once, not _ever_.

“Love,” he says, because he doesn’t want it to be true. He does not want their entire shared history to be nothing but a phantom limb that Crowley has ached with for centuries. “Flashes of love,” he insists.

 _You must feel it_ , he thinks. _Please, please feel it_.

His hair is short on the sides again and Aziraphale can nearly see the silver edge of that scar.

They had been lying together on that old bed on the top floor of the bookshop. The one that was used for sex and nothing else. Aziraphale had lifted the edge of his hair, had tucked it behind his ear.

“How’d you get this?” he had asked, because he had always wondered and never said anything. But he had been drunk enough then to voice the question, drunk enough to move with the abrupt pain across Crowley’s face— to hold him unflinchingly through a memory he carried around his neck like a stone.

“You’re being _ridiculous_ ,” Crowley says.

Aziraphale stares after him for a moment, just long enough to wonder what this has been like for him— the last one hundred years and he has not been able to feel any of it, _ever_.

_What do you mean, loved?_

When he arrives home that night, prophetic book in hand and Crowley leaning over the roof of his car, he will think wildly that all of this must be a part of the plan. The Divine one. The Ineffable one. The one he can not escape. The one he is beholden to beyond anything else.

Perhaps it is for the best, he thinks, that the great serpent of Eden, the one he is prophesized to vanquish on that red-chalk hill, to not know that the angel tasked with his defeat is also the angel who loves him. A betrayal of that magnitude, he thinks, should perhaps be kept to himself.

He takes the book and a final look at Crowley, does not invite him inside. He thinks perhaps it is best that he carry this burden alone.

Because this is it— it must be. It must have meaning, because everything has meaning— all of it. The theater of their lives is conducted, he knows, by the hand that created them all. And surely She would not lead him astray.

* * *

Crowley is waiting for him at the bandstand. He can see him there— down the long stretch of park pathway, pacing and moving and removing his hands from his pockets, shuffling them through his hair.

It feels, strangely, like a dream.

Like he has been here before, in this life or another one. He can see the bench he had sat on exactly one-hundred and one years ago— _1918_ — and he turns his head over his shoulder to see the pond that the humans had drained back then, had filled instead with temporary housing for tanks and armaments.

Aziraphale can hear Crowley’s voice as if he is speaking in his ear, the devil perpetually on his shoulder— _If we don’t find him it won’t be the war to end all wars. It will be the war to end everything_.

He closes his eyes and it’s all still so fresh— so tangible. Like he will reach Crowley at the bandstand and find that he has blood soaking through his shirt again, a bullet-hole up on his arm, his hip. Exit wounds and entry wounds, both of them bleeding and he can’t stop it, he can’t heal him.

They had tried that once, he remembers, and the burn of holy energy had left him curled up for a week.

He opens his eyes and looks back at that pond— it’s filled now, with ducks and memories and he can see the fence-rail he had thrown that offending slip of paper over, the last spot he had seen Crowley before he went missing for 54 years.

“Well?” Crowley is asking, clearly strung tight on anxiety and fear, “any news?” He is saying something about the Antichrist’s shoe size.

Aziraphale fiddles with his hands in front of him, tries to breathe through the bruising grip of fear in his chest.

They are running out of time and Crowley does not know exactly what that means. He does not understand that it will not be just the end of the world, it will be the end of _their_ world— their immortal one— the end of their time together. No more long nights or long baths, no more too-many-drinks and not-enough-touches. He will never again behold the color of Crowley’s hair in the sunshine on the fields of France. He will never again cup the back of that neck as it settles between his thighs. He had not known when those touches were happening that they would be their last.

He can remember washing Crowley’s burnt feet once, in a basin in his bookshop— and he thinks with a stab of regret at how he had not savored it as much as he should have, he had not understood the burn of coming loneliness.

“It’s the Great Plan, Crowley,” Aziraphale says, but he is also saying it to himself. All those cups of coffee, all those glasses of wine. He should have savored them. He should held them both still in the moment and forced the time to stop— forced Crowley to stop it for them.

“Yeah,” Crowley bites out, circling and moving and he never stops— never holds still long enough for Aziraphale to look at him fully and he wants him to now— because who knows when the battle horns of heaven will sound and they’ll both be pulled away to that strip of desert— _Via Maris_. _The way to the sea._

“For the record,” Crowley says, and the anger in his voice heals and rends Aziraphale in equal part, “great _pustulant_ mangled _bollocks_ to the Great Blasted Plan.”

There is a spike of adrenaline that courses through him at those words and Aziraphale squeezes his fingers together in fear— _don’t yell at Her_ , he thinks wildly, _there may be hope for you yet but not if you yell at Her. Tell me you don’t still do that_. _Tell me you don’t hold that pillar of salt against Her._

“May you be forgiven,” he blurts out, his tongue tripping up over the words. It’s automatic. It’s without thinking.

Crowley turns to look at him sharply, those eyebrows pressed together over his glasses.

“I won’t be forgiven,” he says, and there is no softness in his voice, not this time, just the living edge of bitterness, the burn of salt, “not ever. That’s part of a demon’s job description. Unforgivable, that’s _what I am_.”

“You were an angel once,” Aziraphale says, too quickly— and then hopes, in some small way, that he’ll be able to feel it, just this once, just so he knows.

 _I love you_ , he thinks, and his heart is a beating mad animal trapped inside the cage of his ribs. But Crowley’s face does not change in sudden registration of emotion and Aziraphale realizes, dimly, that the Great Plan is as inescapable for him as it is for Crowley. It is his lot in life, Aziraphale thinks, to ask so many questions and still not understand. 

“That was a _long_ time ago,” Crowley says.

The breath leaves Aziraphale’s body, exits into the nearly-winter air. The sky is grey and the bandstand is grey and the monochrome tilt-shift of the world today feels all at once like God perhaps designed it this way. Like She had known, somehow, that they would end up here— on a bandstand in the cold arguing over which of them could kill an eleven-year-old child.

“This is ridiculous,” Crowley is saying, too close yet not close enough, “ _you_ are ridiculous,” and he is saying it because Aziraphale _knows_ how Crowley feels about children— how he has always felt about killing anything. How long had he kept the braids those children had given him in his hair? How long had he stood on the mountains, in the rain, watching the valley floor fill with mud and water and how long ago had it been when he had finally told Aziraphale on that bed in his bookshop that that tiny silver scar above his ear came when he had cut those braids off his head himself— shorn off with a dull knife?

He had buried their bones before the crows could come down, had covered their bodies with rocks.

“I don’t even know why I’m still talking to you,” Crowley says, and his voice is raw with anger.

“Well frankly, neither do I,” Aziraphale responds, knowing, with sudden clarity that that is exactly what he has to do— cover it up with rocks— put a resurrection stone over the entire thing, their entire shared history— dilute it down into nothing, _bones_ , and prevent it from rising like specter— he would be haunted by enough things, he knows. It will be a mercy, he thinks, to make this all digestible. To make this poison drinkable. A bit of alchemy between them. Crowley has never felt it anyway.

“Enough,” Crowley says, “I’m leaving.”

“You can’t _leave_ , Crowley,” Aziraphale says, “there isn’t anywhere to go.”

 _You won’t be able to outrun this_ , he thinks, _you will not be able to sleep it away._

“It’s a big universe,” Crowley says with his arms outstretched— And he isn’t wrong, not at all, but the universe, Aziraphale knows, will not allow them to escape the tightly twisted strings of their fate. They are braided together. Buried beneath a valley floor.

“Even if all of this ends up in a puddle of burning goo we can go off together.”

There is softness in his voice, and vulnerability— that heart sewn right upon his sleeve.

Those arms are still outstretched and Aziraphale wonders what it would feel like to step into the breadth of them in this moment, have them close around him tight. Just once more. Just for old time’s sake. Just before the end.

“Go off together?” he asks, wondering what Crowley had ever done to deserve this not-knowing, this ceaseless toss of his heart on the waves and nothing to anchor it. Beholden to the tides. “Listen to yourself.”

“How long have we been friends?” Crowley asks, and the word _friend_ bleeds like a wound.

Crowley is still so careful, after all this time, to put a label on the thing they have never said.

“Six-thousand years,” he finishes, and Aziraphale can see that there’s hope there, underneath his glasses, in the calculated breaths he is taking.

“ _Friends_?” Aziraphale says, and he can feel anger in his throat, battery-acid in his veins. Even without being able to detect love he should have better language for this thing between them.

He feels all at once a great sympathy for how Crowley must have felt here, in this same park, over one hundred years ago. The word _fraternizing_ bubbles up in his mouth and he swallows it back like bile.

“We’re not friends,” he spits out, “we are an _angel_ and a _demon_ ,” he bites back the sudden desire to spell it all out for him— an angel and a demon who are marching into battle. An angel who has the sacred task of destroying him. The one with that great chain and the key to the bottomless pit. The demon who walks with him arm-in-arm. The one who doesn’t realize that arm belongs to his enemy.

 _This will hurt so much less_ , Aziraphale thinks _, if you do not realize the depth of my betrayal._

“We have nothing whatsoever in common— I don’t even _like_ you.”

It does not work— Crowley has known him too long. He has heard Aziraphale lie to customers, lie to his head office. He has seen the letters he has written to Gabriel in Heaven, the glowing reviews he leaves on sub-par restaurants who try their best. Crowley had helped with the invention of lying, of course he would know how to spot a fake.

“You _do_ ,” he counters, angry and pleading.

“Even if I _did_ know where the Antichrist was, I _wouldn’t tell you_ ,” Aziraphale is grasping for something to say to make him stop. Something to make him walk away— maybe disappear into the universe where he might escape their gravity, their orbit, this thing that ties them together.

“We’re on _opposite_ sides.”

Crowley stalks toward him, nonplussed, stupidly, _ridiculously_ stubborn. Persistent and aggravating and wonderful.

And smart enough, Aziraphale knows, to say exactly the thing that will be hardest to deny.

“We’re on _our side_ ,” he seethes.

His tongue gets caught between his teeth and he hisses when he says it. There’s a peek of the pink of it there, and Aziraphale stares into it, desirous of nothing more than reaching forward, falling into it, running off together to whatever star Crowley has picked out for them. Find _Polaris_ , follow it home.

But God would find him anywhere, and the tide that courses through his veins cannot be emptied out— he follows it like the ocean follows the moon. There is no sense in denying it. His greatest hope, right now, is for Crowley perhaps to escape.

“There is no _our side_ , Crowley,” he says, and the beating mad animal that used to be his heart is now so strangely quiet.

But there’s liquid in his eyes, _too much_ , and he will not allow himself to cry in front of Crowley, not now, not when he needs him to leave, to get out, to never come back. _Don’t let the trick play out on your face_.

“Not anymore,” he says, smart enough to know the thing that will break Crowley’s heart for good, the thing that will send him away.

He considers that thermos of holy water locked up in Crowley’s care, in his flat— hopes that Crowley will not take the nuclear option.

“It’s over,” he says.

Mutually assured destruction.

It is quiet for a few beats too long, and for once, Crowley is entirely still.

Aziraphale can finally behold his face without movement, the fall of his hands, his shoulders— a moon no longer in orbit.

“Right,” Crowley mutters, and there is no anger there, not anymore. “Well then,” he says, and looks down, looks away.

The pain is volcanic— a quiet eruption as it sinks into his bones. _Is this what Hell is like_? he wonders, and closes his eyes against the singing vacancy in his chest. The burn of coming loneliness.

“Have a nice doomsday,” Crowley says, and leaves him standing alone.

Aziraphale closes his eyes and wraps his hands up around his arms, feeling for that love that Crowley still radiates— even now. A sweater he never wants to take off. Air he will never tire of breathing. A bath he wishes he could sink into— and never rise out of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am... awful, AWFUL at responding to comments. I start sweating and get nervous and I don't know how to handle the immense kindness that you all bestow on me. The kindest words ever spoken to me have been from AO3 comments and you are all some sort of angels for sticking through the horror show that this story has become. 
> 
> Thank you always and forever. I'm glad you get somethin' out of these lil things I write for myself.


	7. peripeteia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it occurred to me long after I had planned out this story that the whole apocalypse thing takes place in the summer. So, yeah, just throw that out the window with the rest of canon because I was under the belief it took place in the almost-winter. They were wearing COATS in the behind the scenes footage! and there are no leaves on the trees! so yeah, sorry if that is a confusing divergence from canon.

His clothes still stink of rejection.

He has half a mind of casting them off, pulling on something new. Something that won’t burn where it touches him.

He had been rejected from Heaven, long ago, and rejected by Hell, forty minutes ago, and rejected by Aziraphale, this morning. And then this afternoon. _Again_.

And isn’t it something, he thinks, that rejection is a medicine you never get accustomed to swallowing.

He tongues along his incisors and stares at that painting on his wall, the one that hides the safe with the demonic equivalent of an atomic bomb inside.

He can hear it ticking.

Or maybe that’s just the end times counting down, the sea boiling, the sky turning to flame.

He considers briefly that this is exactly what he wanted it for— demons after him for fucking the whole thing up and Aziraphale consistently rebuffing his offers to run off. He can still feel the _it’s over_ in his ears, can still taste the bile in the back of his throat.

And he realizes that he never really considered what it would feel like to be here— in this moment, standing on the edge of annihilation. He has an option, an exit plan, the thing he always wanted that Aziraphale had finally given to him. The choice to end it all. _Don’t go unscrewing the cap_.

He files his back teeth together, flexes his jaw.

He had given humans the option of choice— long ago— and with it all the shame and suffering, all the glory and hope. And there is something ironic, he thinks, that when it came right down to it, he’s never had a choice in anything, not really, not since.

Not since he slithered up that wall and caught a glimpse of pale ankle, saw the windswept curls, the upturned nose. Not since he heard that first slightly hysteric, _I gave it away_. Not since Aziraphale had held out a wing, protected him from rain before they knew what rain even was.

He swings the painting wide, clicks open the combination.

And maybe that’s something too— that Aziraphale had protected him from that first bit of water and then had given him the nuclear option of it, later. Maybe Aziraphale had been right all along and he didn’t really have a choice— maybe none of them did, and the illusion of it was just a balm to help everyone sleep at night. A magic trick no one wants to figure out. Get led astray by the misdirection. Let the wool be pulled over sleepy eyes.

He isn’t sure why it had taken him so long to realize it. It had always been there and he had always guided his life by it. A North Star, a _Polaris_. Something he had anchored onto early and had steered around since. A choice that he had denied for a long time and then gave into all at once. A choice that very clearly didn’t choose him back but he was giving into headlong all the same. 

He lifts that tartan thermos out of his safe with gloves on, decants it into a bucket.

There had been a time— _before_ — when he’d had a mind to pour this liquid into a shot glass, garnish it with orange peel and maybe a single ice cube, toss the whole thing back. Let himself dissolve into nothing.

And the thought still sounds good, in a way— to just _cease_ existing, no more thoughts, no more indecision. Slip out of his suffering and the memories of all the _it’s overs_ , and the _we’re not friends_ and the _don’t say its_. Shed them like a coat.

His hand shakes as he pours the liquid out.

He could dunk himself into this bucket right now, he knows. And the temptation is there. He could slide off this planet and slide off this skin and become nothing. Echo around in the universe as basic elements. Maybe all of his nitrogen, carbon, magnesium would float up into the firmament, become starstuff again.

But he glances up to that box on his desk, to the oyster shells and the bullet slugs and that bit of painted wall that rest inside, and that _Polaris_ shines ever bright in his mind.

The choice is worth it, he knows. The razor wire and the battle wounds, the burnt feet and the broken hearts. He’d do it all over again just to see how Aziraphale’s eyes change color over the course of an afternoon, just to behold the edges of his smile in his gaze for one more minute.

Even if it’s the edge of a smile that is telling him _no, sorry, the answer is still no_.

The thermos pours into the pail and his eternal exit plan with it. He stacks the bucket delicately over the near-open door, decides to sit at his desk and sit with his choices— the choice to climb up that garden wall, the choice to share oysters with the enemy, the choice to rescue him from the Bastille, and then again from Passchendaele, and then again from Nazis.

He used to think that he’d had options at all those points in history. That he’d have been able to choose differently if he really wanted to— choose to be selfish and choose to be alone. Choose to be free.

But he knows now there hadn’t been. Not really. Not when it came to right down to it. He could no more choose not do those things than he could choose not to be a demon.

No. He knows now there’s really ever only been one choice. All along. At any point. It has always been Aziraphale. And he is going to choose him again.

* * *

Something has snapped. A tether somewhere has come loose.

He is standing in his office, next to his desk, flexing and unflexing his hand.

There is still the steaming pile of what used to be Ligur on his floor, in the doorway, and his ansaphone sings with the tinny voice of Hastur trapped inside.

He glances over to the amorphous blob that is in his doorway, then back at the landline phone on his desk.

He’s safe. He knows he is. Hastur is perfectly trapped and Ligur no longer exists— in _any_ capacity. He should be fine. He should feel grounded. He should be getting out of here.

But he has that sinking feeling like he has forgotten something, a cold sweat along his forehead. His skin prickles with a strange energy until the hairs along his arm stand on end and he feels a slow pulling out of the blood in his veins. Tides following a moon that suddenly has no planet.

He should be fine. He has bought himself some time— enough time perhaps to go throw his heart into Aziraphale’s blender again. To try and convince him to get off this doomed planet, run off to someplace less inhabited. Throw himself headlong into his forever choice.

Their earthly bodies might not be able to exist there, he knows, not as they do now. The air on alien planets might be higher in nitrogen, deficient in oxygen. The pressure might be all wrong.

But he will burn a miracle a second if it means a lifetime of Aziraphale safe and next to him.

He looks back at his phone on the desk, the machine blinking next to it.

Aziraphale had called him. _Called him_. Despite the _it’s overs_ and the _we’re not friends_ , Aziraphale had called him and had something important to say and he’d be damned, _again_ , if he isn’t going to find out what it is.

Crowley pauses, squints at the phone. Aziraphale had said something about knowing where the Antichrist is— but there had been someone else in the room with him, a male voice he could hear just as he had been about to hang up.

He slips around the mess of the dissolved puddle of Ligur, feeling around his pockets for his mobile, that tether, some way of reaching out and holding Aziraphale.

Even if he doesn’t want it.

He pauses, his heart stutters.

Because he doesn’t, he reminds himself. He doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want _him_.

Not anymore.

He stops short in his hallway, swallows down against that memory.

 _It’s over_.

And then, _go off… together?_

As if the idea had never even crossed his mind. What good is it, Crowley thinks, to read all of those books and derive no ideas from them? He must have read at least _something_ where the star-crossed lovers make it out, make off.

Not that they’re lovers, he thinks, not entirely. Not quite.

He stumbles over memories of Aziraphale at the Dionysos in Athens, at the Globe, in stone theaters all across Rome, queueing up like a human. Hamlet and Metamorphoses and Antigone. So many tragedies. Pyramus and Thisbe.

His legs restart, carry him down that hallway, out that too-large door. He had nearly kissed Aziraphale there once— after the first time, _their_ first time— and he can still feel the phantom ache along his skin where he had wanted to press into him but didn’t.

 _It’s over_.

He has to try again— he _has_ to. He has no choice, he knows. He _never_ has. And it is not as though he contains pride, contains dignity. Those things had been burnt off years ago, had been filed down into easily ignorable nubs. Skin has grown over those wounds. Even grass, by now, has covered up the battle-scarred landscape of Verdun.

He will go to Aziraphale, yes, and try again. He has no choice, not really. Swallow back the _it’s overs_ , and the _we’re not friends_ , and desperately, desperately try not to think of the _fraternizing_. He will go to Aziraphale and explain to him that he had been very wrong— he _would_ think of him while up in the stars, and _no_ , there is no place for him in Heaven, not anymore— and if Aziraphale has any shred of faith in him he should follow him and run away. Run off. _Together_.

Because why not? There is nothing left to lose— the planet is dying and the humans are _going_ to die and Heaven and Hell are about to meet up at Megiddo and who knows who will win. And who would Crowley fight for anyway?

He pauses.

 _Aziraphale_ , his mind supplies. _I’d fight for him. And if I had a choice not to I wouldn’t take it._

He is in his car before he realizes it, phone ringing. But there is no answer and the deepening chasm of space in his chest grows— like metal spreaders on his rib cage, cracking him open, letting panic slowly filter in.

He files his back teeth together, blinks back the growing edge of fear.

“Answer your fucking phone, angel,” he pleads, driving too fast and caring too little.

He has an internal device, a clock, a _rhythm_ — some failsafe that tells him Aziraphale is okay. It chimes and rings and occasionally when the angel has gotten himself into trouble it _buzzes_ — like the sing of a raw nerve— it had buzzed when he had gotten locked up in the Bastille and it had buzzed again when he had been betrayed by Nazis. It buzzed in America and it buzzed at Passchendaele.

And that part of him now— that failsafe that permanently exists in the chambers of his heart— the three or four or eight of them— is not buzzing or ringing or chiming. It is entirely, horrifically quiet.

It has _never_ been quiet. What with Aziraphale always getting himself up to trouble, always popping across the channel for bread, for _crepes_. It has always hummed along in the background of his immortal life, even before they had shared food and shared drinks and shared pleasures. It hummed before he had a name for what he felt for him. It hummed when he had stood up on that Garden wall and for the longest time Crowley had thought that was just the function of these corporeal bodies they’d been given— that they came made with little devices for detecting danger.

It had taken him a while to realize that it detected danger not for himself, but for that one particular angel.

That Principality with the flaming sword that was supposed to guard the Eastern Gate, the apple tree. His own heart beating behind different ribs. His polar opposite. His better half.

It’s silent.

_Why is it silent?_

He reaches for it— that string between them, that pull, the line of his orbit. But there’s nothing there. No path to follow. No planet.

There is suddenly so very little oxygen in his car and he rolls down the window for air, tries to ease the furious pounding of his heart, the near panic and the tightening of his throat.

And then he smells it— _smoke_.

It is in his mouth suddenly, on his tongue. Black and char and _death_.

And then he hears it— _sirens_.

He can feel his pulse in his jaw, the slick of chilled blood running up his neck.

And then all at once he can _see it_ — turning around that corner— smoky grey clouds pluming out of the windows, underneath the door. The bookshop on fire.

There are fireman there and one of them is running up to him— asking if he owns the place. He sneers something he does not remember and snaps the door open— not caring if the humans see his trick, notice his power— Aziraphale is inside this wreck, this _mess_ , and he is not fireproof— he remembers his burnt palms once— not even close.

“Aziraphale? Where the heaven are you, you idiot? _I can’t find you_.”

There is no answer and those metal spreaders on his chest cavity crack a little wider, a little more panic files inside.

“ _Aziraphale!_ ”

That failsafe should have been buzzing, should have been _screaming._

The backroom is burning and their memories with it— the sofa is up in flames, the tiny stove is melting. The Foucalts and the Descartes and the Cayces are the fuel enabling the blaze and Aziraphale isn’t here and he isn’t answering his phone—

He can hear Aziraphale’s voice in his head, had felt the slide of his eyes across his bruised chest once— _you’re fireproof_ — and then again as he handled the stove-heated metal of a cooking pot. He had eyed him in curious wonder, as if desirous of such a curse, to be burnt by fire and not feel it.

He understands it suddenly— the snapping of that tether, the something coming loose, the failsafe that no longer exists— Aziraphale is gone. Missing. Discorporated or something worse.

A rabbit put back into a hat. A woman disappearing into a box. Sawed in half.

But there’s no magic trick, he knows. Not this time.

He sways where he stands and he can’t see, not quite, not with this much grief in his eyes, this much pain in his chest. There is a rising tide of pain inching up his legs from the floor, emptiness and fear clinging to him in an oily embrace. It sinks into his skin. It reaches between his bones.

There is suddenly no anchor. There is no North Star. No _Polaris_. There is only an ocean of regret and depthless reaches of things left unsaid. The tide rises— up to his ears— and he cannot breathe through it.

A stream of water breaks through the shop window, right through Aziraphale’s human pseudonym, hits him square in the chest.

It might have hurt— the blast— if he hadn’t already been so numb.

He falls back against the ground, glasses broken, and stares up at the burning beams of the ceiling.

It is surely about to collapse. About to rain down on him and he wishes vehemently that he were not fireproof— and that Aziraphale had been.

He stops breathing because there is no need to— not anymore— but the immortality in his body keeps the blood pumping anyway, keeps the heart beating. He wonders wildly how something so broken can still function.

There are flames licking near the side of his head, close to his ear. He closes his eyes and tries to gulp down some air but it feels like drowning every time he tries— because how can you breathe without lungs, without a heart? Something else besides air fills in his chest. The atmosphere is suddenly heavy.

He lays there a moment longer, panic lying alongside the emptiness. It catches in his throat, it squeezes in his chest. He wonders how he can feel both so empty and so full of grief.

He sits up and looks into the flamed-licked edges of the backroom, the sofa that they had watched the moon-landing on. Black and ruined and the tartan fabric is gone. Like Aziraphale. Covered up by black.

He chokes out something like a gasp because maybe he did this— maybe he had caused this with his shitty choices, his incessant pushing. Maybe if he had left Aziraphale alone up on that garden wall none of this would have happened.

He wishes he could go back— alter all of his choices— leave Aziraphale alone up on that wall. Live out six-thousand years of loneliness. Orbit him from a safer distance.

He looks down at his hands spread out on the wooden floor, the one he had complained about so many times— _when are you gonna get a fuckin’ vacuum, angel?_ — and sees instead only the negative space where Aziraphale’s hand should be, the distinct lack of a wedding ring.

He wonders how he can possibly exist beyond this— a moon without a planet. A single woman sawed in half and the part with the heart, the head, the mouth wheeled off stage into the black. He is just legs, genitals, feet that won’t work. He has nothing to orbit around, not anymore, and the vacancy radiates through his chest, sinks into the pit of his stomach. 

There is a high-pitched chiming in his ear, and he isn’t sure what it is from— the jet of water or the singing of the fire or perhaps just the repetitive suicide of his own cells as the weight of Aziraphale’s absence sinks into him.

“You’ve gone,” he says, to that empty room, those flames, that pooling water, that one surviving book on the floor.

This is it, he knows. This is how it went.

There had been no kisses. There had been no wedding ring. There had been no happily-ever-after and no breakfast in bed. There had never been a Sunday afternoon wrapped up on the sofa, doing the crossword. There had never been the mingling of toothbrushes kissing in the same sink-side cup. There had not been a word like _husband_ to define him when someone asked. There had been no descriptor to his name other than _friend_.

Maybe _best friend_ , he thinks, feeling entirely broken open.

He wonders if there is anything left in that thermos. If there are enough molecules of water left to wash him away.

“Someone killed my best friend,” he says, and then the anger bubbles out, “ _bastards_ ,” he cries, “all of you.”

His glasses are broken and he does not care as he steps out onto the sidewalk. He looks at them in his hand, wonders if it is still considered littering if it’s perpetuated by a ghost.

‘World’s ended anyway,” he says, feeling nothing, and crunches them underfoot.

* * *

He had been here before— this bodega, this all-night bar. He had made something of a habit of stopping here on his way home from the bookshop, had become accustomed to putting back entire bottles of single-malt whisky— Balvenie and Laphroaig and Aberfeldy— thirty and twenty-five and twenty-one year old time-capsules.

He cannot remember what had happened that one particular night between them. Sex maybe, and miscommunication likely, and nostalgia definitely. For what he had not known— the silent companionship of their time in the Garden perhaps, or simpler moments in the middle of wars, or the taste of the water that came out of his bathroom tap at too late in the evening when he knew he was spending the night.

It had always burned, the _missing_ , and he had never been able to figure out why his heart ached every time he left, every time he stepped over that threshold.

It had always burned and it was always simmering— an anger and a frustration for the unchanging _stick_ of the way things were, the way things _had_ to be.

He had known to be grateful. He had known to be content.

Aziraphale was _there_ and he always would be and even if he couldn’t _say_ it, couldn’t _kiss_ it, the angel existed and that should have been enough. How much more could a demon deserve?

But in typical fashion it _hadn’t_ been enough, not even close, because he _wanted_ with a fury that humans said the Old Gods did. A snake devouring the world. And he had found himself that night sucking back the smoky peat of whisky and savoring the burn of it all. Letting the alcohol kill off the molecules of longing in his throat.

A tiny yellowing television had been blaring BBC1 behind the bar, had showed video then of a wall in Berlin, of it all coming tumbling down.

Crowley had watched as the news channel zoomed in on humans and abandoned guard towers, on the concrete, the razor-wire.

The humans on the television had come out in droves, had taken up into the night with shovels and sledgehammers, had chipped away at the concrete behemoth and shuttled off with souvenirs of its carapace. He had wondered where that bit of _his_ wall had gone— the one he had learned the translation to and wished he hadn’t.

The one that said, _time doesn’t heal anything_.

He is here again, in this pub. Only this time it isn’t 1991, and Aziraphale isn’t here, _not anymore_ , and there is still a bit of that wall that has remained standing through all of it. Through shovels and sledgehammers. Through time and fires.

He sucks back the burn of it, the _missing_ — of simpler times that he had not realized were simple until they had already passed. He had not appreciated the quiet domesticity of their life until Aziraphale had gone and the bookshop had gone and all of their memories tied to that place had disappeared too.

He closes his eyes against it and wishes he could spend another night on that sofa, listen to the angel making tea in the next room, hear the tinkling of silverware on ceramic and feel the glow of incandescent lighting from those bulbs that never burned out. Gas lamps outside and wine between them. Rain on the windows. London in October.

He has been mumbling, perhaps, to the bottle and to the table, to the barkeep when he’s nearby. The humans have taken to glancing at him sidelong and moving their chairs away and he has half a moment of considering that he ought to do something demonic— light a small fire on the table, turn all of the liquid in the bottles behind the bar into dish soap, invert all of the stools to stand on the ceiling.

“I never asked to be a demon,” he mumbles, and does exactly none of those things.

But perhaps he is having an affect on the weather— the outside rain abruptly morphing into an electrical storm, thunder vibrating overhead.

The pub is _dim_ , and even sitting by the window there isn’t much light. But even behind his dark glasses he can see that there is a strange trick of the light playing out in front of him. Perhaps it is the flashing of the lightning outside the glare of those windows. Or maybe it’s the shine of so many transparent bottles behind him from the bar illuminating something strange, refracting through his sunglasses, or maybe he has just had far, _far_ too much to drink.

But it looks like Aziraphale is in front of him.

And that empty place where a heart used to be suddenly moves again. Tries to beat.

“Aziraphale,” he breathes.

It’s _him_. Watery and near transparent. A ghost. He pushes his glasses up onto his forehead and squints into the illusion.

“Are you here?”

“Good question,” and there is suddenly Aziraphale’s voice, here, in this bar. Or maybe just in his head.

He drinks it. Savors it. The burn of it sticks in his ears, sticks in his throat. He is overcome with _missing_ and the panic of not being able to reach out and touch him haunts the tips of his fingers.

He had thought he’d never hear it again. He had thought that their last words to each other would be the hot burn of anger over a child, of Crowley admitting _I’ve got an old friend here_ , _can’t talk_ , as if Hastur was anything of the sort.

“Afraid I’ve rather made a mess of things,” Aziraphale is saying it and Crowley is barely registering it— drunk and numb and trying to breathe, trying to memorize the lines of his near-transparent face.

“Did you go to Alpha Centauri?”

They could be there now, he thinks, and the crack in his ribs aches.

“Oh, _nah_ ,” he says, feigning nonchalance, as if he hasn’t been nursing the splattered remains of his heart for the last hour, “things changed,” he says, and waits a moment, because that ghost of Aziraphale isn’t quite focusing on him, isn’t quite sure where he is.

And isn’t that how it goes, Crowley thinks, that he’s never quite been in the angel’s focus.

“I lost my best friend,” he says, and finds that he doesn’t care, not at all, that his cheeks are entirely wet.

“Oh,” Aziraphale says, as if surprised that Crowley would call him such a thing. As if he doesn’t understand that Crowley wants a house, a home, a wedding ring— a word like _husband_ to define him and another garden someday, just for the two of them— wants his anxieties and Aziraphale’s terrible style choices, his tchotchkes and too-many tea cups. As if he doesn’t understand that the words _best friend_ have been the result of a six-thousand-year reduction over a fire, the ring of salt left in a cup after boiling down an ocean.

“So sorry to hear that,” Aziraphale says, and it is that same buttoned-up decorum he always has, even after blowjobs and hand-jobs and _nightmares_ — _would you like some tea?_ After sucking him off on his bed after six-years apart.

And then, he is asking something about a book, in his bookshop— and Crowley glances beyond the silvery edges of his ghost to see the smoke still piling into the sky.

“Oh,” he interrupts, “it’s… your bookshop’s not there anymore.”

Aziraphale is entirely silent.

“I’m really sorry,” he says, because he is. “It burnt down.”

“All of it?” Aziraphale asks, and Crowley tries not to wonder if he is upset about the loss of books or the loss of memories, that place where they had spent so much time.

“Yeah,” he mumbles, “what was the book?”

And the book— it turns out, is the one he took with him and the one the mad American woman had left behind in his car. He holds it up, proud in his haze of finally doing something _right_.

“Look, I took it,” he says, and points at it, “souvenir!”

And Aziraphale looks _pleased_ , relieved even, and the sight of that relief pours life into that shriveled up thing that used to be Crowley’s heart, edges the panic back.

“I made notes. It’s all in there,” Aziraphale is saying, as if he has figured out some key to something, some means by which they can be together again, put the world back together. “I worked it all out.”

“Where are you?” Crowley asks, because he doesn’t care about putting the world back together he just cares about putting _them_ back together.

“Look,” he says, “wherever you are I’ll come to you.”

And he hopes Aziraphale hears the _wherever_ — hears that he means Hell or Heaven or the place in between. Pyramus and Thisbe, Orpheus and Eurydice.

“I’m not really anywhere,” Aziraphale admits, and the edges of him are starting to flow out. “I’ll need to find a receptive body,” he is saying, and Crowley thinks, wildly, that he has one right in front of him.

“Pity I can’t inhabit yours,” Aziraphale says, with that shy nervous laugh.

Crowley fits his teeth together and swallows, still not in Aziraphale’s focus.

“Tadfield,” he is saying, “airbase.”

And then the ghost of him flows out, evaporates into the ether. 

That tether is still gone and that failsafe is still silent. The thing that used to be a heart bleeds at his absence.

He closes his eyes and wonders at what _receptive body_ Aziraphale will find.

He is not certain he will ever see Aziraphale as he had been again. Not with Heaven marching toward a war and not with the world about to end. He is not certain he will ever behold the pale loveliness of Aziraphale’s face again, the wealth of his skin beneath his hands. He may never again taste the warmth on the insides of his knees, the sunshine on the back of his neck. He may never again witness the endless shift of his eye color beneath a myriad of lights.

Crowley opens his eyes again and stares at that spot where the ghost of Aziraphale had hovered, that place where his voice had sounded.

There is nothing there but the flashing of lightning and a rain-painted window, and beyond it he can still see the smoke billowing up from a fire that won’t stop.

He looks down at the near empty bottle of that Balvenie. A thirty-year time capsule that somehow held walls and memories and too much ache to stomach in its glass house. That ghost of Aziraphale had appeared before him and admitted to making a mess of things, _too late_ , and Crowley realizes that he can no longer stomach the peat of a single-malt scotch.

The smoke of it sticks in his throat, like fire— and the burn of it, the _missing_ , lingers far too long.

* * *

Later, and there _is_ a later— after the near nuclear meltdown, the almost mutually assured destruction, the pausing of time to take them to their own little ethereal desert and stretch their wings, talk some sense into the Antichrist— they walk out into Tadfield and find the nearest source of alcohol.

In the back of his chest, somewhere near the spine, that familiar failsafe hums. The tether pulses.

Aziraphale exists.

Approximately every thirty seconds he has to remind himself of that fact, has to glance over in a panic to see that his edges are entirely solid, not a bit of him transparent. He wants to reach out and touch him, take a hold of that hand, make sure he’s real.

“What kind?” Aziraphale is asking him, as if Crowley cares at all about what he is going to use to deaden his fried nerves, “Spanish Grenache? Côtes-du-Rhône?”

“Whatever you prefer,” he says, and eyes instead the line of cheap whisky.

The banality of it is shocking. A numbing agent in and of itself.

They are standing in a tiny grocery on the edge of town, linoleum checked tile underfoot and fluorescent lighting overhead. The store smells vaguely like the open-air baskets of sweet onions and potatoes, like those out-of-season strawberries that still perfume the air with their fragrance.

He looks at their tiny green cartons, their tiny green hats— remembers a pile of them on his coffee table once. Remembers an angel’s legs around his hips and then on his couch, wrapped up in a blanket.

There is a song playing faintly on the radio behind the register, an errant fly that has survived the first frost of an early winter buzzes at the window.

The glass is filthy, but charmingly so. The light bending through it is colored amber by the dirt.

Crowley stares at it, swaying slightly, and then snaps his eyes over to Aziraphale at the counter, talking to the human behind it.

He’s kind— he always is— but now especially so.

Perhaps, Crowley thinks, because that human behind the counter nearly ceased to exist.

And Aziraphale had nearly ceased to exist too— were it not for a surprisingly compassionate and intuitive Antichrist— who gave Aziraphale back the same body he’d been wearing around for six-thousand years.

Crowley still can’t believe it— not quite— the way he had looked like Madame Tracy one moment and then separated into Aziraphale the next. Like a magic trick. A rabbit pulled suddenly out of a hat. 

He had felt a surge of something, jealousy maybe, at the flush that had been painted up high on the woman’s cheeks— and then it had transmuted into something hot and something angry at the way her eyes had looked somehow disappointed. Like she had been expecting Aziraphale to look like something _else_.

They leave that store and walk down that charmingly cobblestoned road, headed for the tiny bench and hopefully a ride home.

Crowley chances a glance over at Aziraphale in the near-dark, the swiftly setting sun. Studies again the upturned curve of his nose, the silver-gold brush of his eyelashes. There is just enough light left along the horizon to pierce through the color of his irises, refract the sea-color shift of them up into Crowley’s eyes.

He had almost lost him.

The fear of it still crawls and sticks to him, pushes up between his ribs.

He had looked at Madame Tracy but Crowley had not been able to see her underneath so much sunshine, so much warmth. She had been Aziraphale, obviously, instantly recognizable. The thing that made him Aziraphale was not locked up in a body, he knows. It is locked up in something else. A spirit that shines like sunbeams out of whatever face he wears.

Crowley would love him no matter what skin he pulled on— no matter what color his eyes, his hair. Those are window dressings for the being underneath— the being that collects hotel soaps and unironically likes tartan, has pastel bath towels but not a vacuum. The being loves food and loves drink and gets flirty when he’s had too much. The being that collects angel trinkets despite being one himself.

But still, Crowley thinks, watching a bit of that nearly-winter wind lift the curls off his forehead— this face suites him quite well.

“Ah,” Aziraphale says, peaking into the brown paper bag. The sword of Eden tucked beneath his armpit. “It appears I purchased wine with a _cork_ and we do not have an opener.”

“Shoe technique,” Crowley blurts out, and reshuffles the box of Horseman accoutrements under his arm.

Aziraphale looks over at him, startled.

“ _Shoe_ technique?”

Crowley glances over at him, keeps walking.

“Yeah,” he says, “you know. Put the bottle in your boot, toss it against a tree.”

Aziraphale looks mildly scandalized.

“And this… _works_?”

“Eh,” Crowley shrugs, noncommittal, “sort of.”

A miracle would do, he knows, but the protocol of that sort of thing when they just very vehemently denied orders from their respective offices might ring a few bells. And besides— he always had gotten a kick out of showing Aziraphale the tricks that humans thought up for common problems.

He realizes that he’s smiling and tries to hide it but can’t. Aziraphale is beside him again, for better or worse, and he doesn’t smell like smoke. Not even a little bit. Not at all.

It is full on dark by the time they reach that bench and the distinct chill at the end of autumn is sinking into Crowley’s bones. He shifts his shoulders in that jacket that still stinks like rejection and maybe fire— fire from the bookshop and fire from the Bentley— and he swallows down against the pain of losing that machine that had come to be his home.

“And a bus will come?” Aziraphale asks.

“It should,” Crowley mutters, already wiggling off his boot and hopping over to the nearest tree.

“Is this the illustrious _shoe technique_ I am about to witness?” Aziraphale asks, leaning over the back of the bench.

“It’s a highly skilled maneuver,” Crowley says, “ _watch_.” And throws the heel of his shoe against the bark.

The cork pops nearly a third of the way loose, enough to grip with his teeth and pull out. He spits it somewhere over his shoulder.

He sits back down on the bench and hands the bottle over, feeling something a bit like a flush walking up along his cheeks.

“Shoe technique,” he says proudly, and tugs back on his boot.

“Impressive,” Aziraphale murmurs, and then takes a swallow.

Crowley watches the pale throat move around the liquid and he is suddenly desirous of nothing more than leaning over, sticking his nose into that space between ear and jaw, breathing in Aziraphale’s scent and hoping it hasn’t changed.

Instead he fumbles in his jacket pocket, pulls out a carton of cigarettes,selects one with his teeth.

He can feel Aziraphale looking at him as he goes to light it— as he summons up a lick of flame along his thumb. It’s there suddenly, and hot, and the color of it and the movement of it turns something in his chest into ice, into an _icicle_ , stabbing at some unknown organ.

He shutters the flame and pulls the paper out of his mouth, stares down at the road in front of him.

His ear burns along where he can feel Aziraphale’s gaze, probably wondering at him in silent confusion.

 _He’s back_ , Crowley thinks, _the bookshop is still gone but he isn’t_.

“Crowley?”

He turns his head, slowly, to find Aziraphale in the dark.

“Are… are you alright, my dear?”

The pet name sings in his ear, walks down his spine. Heals, perhaps, a bit of that charred edge.

“Fine,” he forces out, and then reaches for the wine.

It’s not very good and it doesn’t burn as much as he’d like but perhaps that’s for the best, he considers— perhaps he has had enough of burning.

There is an ironed-stiffness to them still— some cut off portions of their tongues full of what they aren’t saying. Bits of a wall that hasn’t come down.

The crisis had been averted and now they faced, potentially, another one. A bigger one. One that might still demand leaving this planet, fucking off to another one.

But Aziraphale has remained studiously silent about that idea, has said nothing about the _we could go off togethers_ and the _wherever you are I’ll find you_ s and Crowley’s heart is feeling particularly out of blood left to bleed. Wrung practically dry.

As if catching the multitude of emotions coursing through Crowley’s body Aziraphale reaches over, hands him a slip of paper.

“I caught this,” he says, “out of the air. From the book of prophecy.”

There is something there in oddly written English, something about choosing their faces wisely.

“Is this— Is this about _us_?” Crowley asks.

“I believe so,” Aziraphale says, and takes the wine bottle out of Crowley’s hands, their fingers kissing in the passing. That familiar sleight of hand. It heals and hurts and time, Crowley realizes, hasn’t fixed anything.

“What does it mean?”

“I think,” and Aziraphale is doing that thing where he is choosing his words even more carefully than usual, “that we are going to have to perform a bit of a magic act.”

Crowley stares at him sidelong through the dark, lets his eyes linger on the tip of that nose, the stubbornness of that chin.

“You mean—“

Aziraphale turns and looks at him and Crowley wonders how much of him he can see in the dark, if he can see the tightness in his jaw, the indecision in his cheeks, the _I’m a fuck up_ on his forehead.

“Remember when I said that we’d… probably explode?”

“The receptive body thing?” Crowley asks, and of course he remembers, he wants to say, of course that comment had been imprinted on his bones.

“Yes,” Aziraphale says, and he glances down between them, to the wine bottle in their shared fists, “I believe we might have to try.”

“ _Try_ ,” Crowley repeats. “Try _what_?”

“Wearing, you know, each other’s skin.”

There is that flash of cold up his neck, down his spine.

“No,” he says flatly. “You can’t wear _this_ ,” he says, and looks down at himself, “it might hurt you. You said it yourself.”

Aziraphale rolls his eyes, just a bit, and sighs.

“It won’t hurt me,” he says, “not anymore than this skin would hurt _you_.”

“I’m not worried about that,” Crowley bites out, “a demon in an angel’s shoes is one thing. We’re _built_ for possession. A bit of burning won’t bother me.”

He thinks immediately of churches, of searing off the bottom of his feet for Aziraphale. He’d do it all over again, he knows. He’d lie down in the aisles, drape himself over the pews.

But the thought of Aziraphale sliding into his skin— the one with the fangs and the too many angles and the sickening color of his eyes, the vertical pupils, the ability to see in the dark and the inability to blink all that much. He thinks of Aziraphale wearing these knees, these hips— these joints that don’t hold up well under the weather and winter is coming on soon— he won’t have it. He’s too monstrous, too deficient. He cannot stress clean this body like he stress cleans his flat. He can’t take out the garbage, air out the windows. The whole thing is garbage, he thinks, there aren’t any windows.

“But an angel in a demon’s body? Without me in it with you?” He grits his teeth and shakes his head.

“We _have_ to,” Aziraphale says softly, “Agnes is never wrong.”

Crowley can feel his shoulders hitching up to his ears. An instinctive, protective measure he has always done— an animal protecting its soft parts.

“And what if it doesn’t work?” Crowley says hotly, feeling defensive and prickly and uncertain all at once.

“Well,” Aziraphale takes a long sip from the bottle, looks up at the stars, “we’re fucked anyway.”

The expletive rolling so cleanly out of that mouth shocks the bad mood right off of Crowley’s shoulders and he is suddenly smiling— despite the weirdness and the stiffness and the awkward inability to know how to act, how to handle this entire strange moment.

Aziraphale looks shyly over at him and passes the bottle back, lets the corner of his mouth lift upward in a smile.

“I guess we would be,” Crowley agrees, and those shoulders drop, just a bit.

They sit on that bench and don’t talk about the mechanics of that idea, of what it would entail. They don’t talk about the _go off togethers_ or the _wherever you are I’ll find yous_ or that terrible, terrible moment at the bandstand. They don’t talk about the _it’s overs_ and Aziraphale doesn’t mention the cigarette that is rolling on the ground at Crowley’s feet, unlit.

A delivery driver comes and takes the box of items, the no-longer-flaming sword. The wine is polished off between them.

And down the road the twin lights of a bus shine through the dark.

“Oh,” Aziraphale says, “there it is. Only— it says _Oxford_ on the front.”

“Yeah,” Crowley says, feeling suddenly so very tired, “but he’ll drive to London anyway. Just won’t know why.”

“I suppose I should get him to drop me off at the bookshop.”

Crowley turns to him, feeling abruptly as if he is made of broken glass, about to cut Aziraphale if he handles him too indelicately.

He isn’t soft, he knows. There is nothing _soft_ about him— there never has been. He runs his tongue along the cut of his incisors and wishes he could dull the pain of this knife.

“It burnt down” he says, and he hopes the razor is out of his voice, just this once, “remember?”

Aziraphale looks so suddenly pale in the moonlight, beneath the single warm bulb of a streetlight. His eyes are blue in this particular dark, these particular shadows. Blue and depthless and lonely. That bookshop, Crowley knows, had been the place of anchor for much of his modern life. His books were the thing he hid behind, got lost in. And Crowley suddenly realizes that Aziraphale must feel _homeless_ — like he has felt for so much of his life— a wandering vagrant, calling London a home just because Aziraphale had been there.

And he doesn’t feel it— Crowley knows, he _doesn’t_ feel the same— but he has a thought that maybe Aziraphale could use his flat as a home, like Crowley had used the bookshop, had used _him_. Just this once. For now. A placeholder for a real thing.

“You can stay at my place,” he says, and the offer is placed between them, the tenuous beating of Crowley’s heart beneath it. “If you’d like.”

But he doesn’t take it, and Crowley should’ve known better than to expect it. Not with Aziraphale always pulling back, always reigning in. He had never had to say _no_ , not explicitly, because he had always had so many other ways of saying it.

So many, _it’s getting lates_ and _, I’ve got work to dos,_ and once a very painful, _ta-da_ and the manifestation of sunglasses.

It had taken him a handful of years to get over that one.

“I— I don’t think my side would like that,” Aziraphale says. Another near _no_ without having to say it.

“We don’t have a side anymore,” Crowley says, because Aziraphale, for all his cleverness, still doesn’t understand what they’ve done. “Neither of us do.”

Aziraphale looks panicked between them and Crowley has the sharp edge of regret in his chest, for saying this, for _having_ to say it.

“We’re on our own side,” he says, and hopes that maybe, somehow, he’ll take it as a comfort and not as a regret. 

“Like Agnes said,” Crowley starts, looking down at that cigarette on the ground and then the bus coming up the road, “we’re going to have to choose our faces wisely.”

As if Crowley ever had a choice.

The bus door opens and Crowley steps inside, chooses a seat by the window.

There are so very few humans here and so many empty seats and so it is with something like a bit like shock that Crowley watches Aziraphale walk toward him— and sit next to him on the same bench.

They’re… _in public_. With humans around where they can be watched. The audience is peering behind the curtain. Crowley glances over his shoulder, out the window, scans the darkness out of fear.

And then there are soft knuckles brushing against his own, their thighs kissing on the narrow seat.

Crowley looks down at them, his hand on his thigh and Aziraphale’s on his own, separate but together, the bones in their hands breaching the distance.

He is not sure why it is so intimate. It shouldn’t be. Not here. Not on this Oxford-bound bus that is headed to London. Not on this bus that smells like stale crisps and industrial-strength cleaner, with its inked-stain seats and finger-greased windows.

“It’s alright, my dear.”

Crowley looks up from their hands to Aziraphale’s face, suddenly so close to his.

There is movement below his eyes and he glances down to see that square familiar palm, the one that had been burnt before that he can still see sometimes when he closes his eyes— the blurred head line, the burnt lifeline.

The lines are all there, all as he remembered, he had kissed that palm enough times that he should know. He swallows down that lump in his throat, that burn, the _missing_ — and threads his fingers into Aziraphale’s.

It feels like coming home again, like Aziraphale finally isn’t missing from him, not anymore.

“It feels like you,” he mutters, and then realizes how completely insane that must sound, “I mean— I just— I didn’t know if it was the _same_ body or—“

“As far as I can tell,” Aziraphale says, “haven’t gotten to uh, check out what’s underneath but,” he pauses and swallows and there is the loveliest bit of pink along the tips of his ears, the apple of those cheeks. Crowley wants to bite it. “Perhaps you could let me know.”

For something that he thought to be dead— _shattered_ — his heart is doing a very professional job of beating too loudly in his ears.

“I could do that,” he says, and then sucks his lip into his mouth, bites on it. “Yeah,” he breathes, “I can do that.”

“Good,” Aziraphale says, as prim as ever, their hands still locked together at the palm— the lifelines lined up, the heart lines intersecting. “I look forward to it.”

He wants to reach over and take his free hand and cup it up underneath that stubborn chin, tip back that neat mouth and press it against his own. Finally learn the topography of those even white teeth with his tongue. Lick the further-north inside of him he hasn’t gotten to yet. He’d kiss him straight through the seat, through the bus, down onto the floor, into the earth. He’d kiss him like dew on morning flowers— softly, and then all at once.

But instead he holds himself very still, and endeavors not to stare, and squeezes very gently at his hand.

Aziraphale squeezes back, and the not-kissing is suddenly much more bearable. Because Aziraphale is back, in his body, for at least a bit more time— and they are headed back to Crowley’s flat.

His heart thrums out a desperate sound, and there is sweat beginning in the center of his chest, down his back. He’d spend the night, the _whole_ night, and Crowley wouldn’t have to wander out at three or four in the morning, find his way home.

He is all at once filled with the giddy, reckless joy of it all— Aziraphale hanging up his clothes in _his_ closet, making tea with _his_ kettle. His fingerprints would be all over the tea cups, all over the counter, on his taps and on his doorknobs. There would be the indents of his thighs on his sofa and chairs and lip marks on his drinking glasses. Crowley would never clean it again. He’d keep the motes of his dust to hang around the corners of his flat until London ceased to exist anymore. He’d never wash those bedsheets again.

And he has a moment where he remembers that burning wooden floor— what it looked like beneath his fingers and what it looked like beneath the flames. Can remember distinctly seeing that floor with motes of their dust on it, in the corners. Remembers saying, _when are you gonna get a fuckin’ vacuum, angel_?

He squeezes a little harder at that hand that is still locked to his, feels an echoing squeeze back.

He turns his head and flexes his jaw and stares out at the darkened landscape. There is a pit of something hard in his stomach. Something black. It oozes and seeps and creeps up the walls of his chest.

It is little wonder that Aziraphale doesn’t love him— not with all his sharp edges, the razors in his voice. He will never be soft. He will never be drinkable.

The tightness is just reaching his throat when there is a very soft and very gentle pressure on his shoulder.

He turns his head and looks to find the fluffy white down of Aziraphale’s head, cradled against his arm.

His eyes are closed and he shifts with a small noise of discontent until he finds a pleasing angle, settles down against him with a sigh.

“You smell rather a bit like smoke,” he mutters, and Crowley has suddenly never been more aware of his arm, of how it fits into the socket of his shoulder.

“Sorry,” he mumbles.

“It has been a very long day,” Aziraphale says.

Crowley, sitting very upright and very stiff, relaxes the smallest amount. Maybe their story won't be a tragedy, he thinks, not just yet. Aziraphale may like the sad ones but he never has. And wouldn't it be nice, Crowley thinks, to choose the happy ending. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine it. 

“It has,” he agrees, and gives that hand in his another squeeze.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you're all really, really, really lovely. 
> 
> thank you for so many kind words <3 
> 
> we are... almost finished :D


	8. hamartia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter took forever because I started writing it and just _didn't stop_ and the result is this strange transitional chapter and already having 6k of the next one. So the next update will be soon. So, after this guy there will be two chapters left <3 (oh my god it'll be _finished_ ).
> 
> also, there's a content warning for discussion of suicide in this chapter.

There is an angel on his shoulder.

He’s always been there really, but this time he’s snoring.

Crowley understands that Aziraphale does not sleep. Not if he can help it. The angel had done it exactly twice— that he knows of— the first time when he had been weak with blood-loss and the second time immediately afterward— after Crowley had pulled a bullet out of his leg and Aziraphale had stitched the skin back into pale perfection.

Only he’d had a nightmare on the second go, something that awoke him sweating from his sleep and calling Crowley’s name and announcing assuredly that _no_ , he would never be attempting the business of sleeping ever again.

Crowley had wanted to explain to him that sleep, even if it sometimes came with nightmares and dreams that left him aching between the ribs, also came with escape— an ability to transport through time. Fifty-four years of it, sometimes.

But Aziraphale had never desired such a thing, had _detested_ it even— as if time was some sort of non-renewable resource between them, as if they weren’t immortal.

The noise coming from his shoulder is soft and oddly, vexingly adorable and Crowley tamps down on that emotion that is lifting up through him. Covers it beneath the floorboards, buries it in the basement.

It feels as though they have been on this bus for an eternity and his legs are cramping, his knees ache with the right angles of their station.

But it is easier to to bear the pain of stiff joints and cramping legs than it is to look Aziraphale in the eye. It is easier to sit in the warmth of his proximity and not think about tomorrow. Let him stay on this bus forever. Sitting upright. Not moving. Two hands locked at the life-line and an angel on his shoulder and no one asking him where they go from here.

He watches the rise of the moon through the bare branches of the trees and wonders how much time they have left. How long until they face retribution.

He feels all at once a great wave of empathy for Aziraphale always fretting about the hours— so many _slow downs_ and _you can’t do 90 miles per hour_ and once a very painful _you go too fast for me_ — the angel never sleeping because it would sweep the minutes away.

And now he gets it. The non-renewable nature of time and the fuel gauge of their usually perpetually filled immortality suddenly down near empty. An expiration date stamped on their foreheads.

He glances over to Aziraphale motionless on his shoulder, tries to memorize what his heat and what his weight feel like— crumbs to sustain himself through the burying of his heart.

Aziraphale up this close smells like he always has— warm bread and clean linen, sunshine on lavender fields. He smells like those bottles in his bathroom that no longer exist— the green one this time— and something in Crowley’s heart aches at the memory.

Those bottles are gone and that bathroom is gone and with it all of their first times— there had been no toothbrushes kissing in the same sink-side cup. There had been no Sundays on the couch doing the crossword. There had been only Aziraphale sitting on the porcelain edge of that soaking tub once— there had been Crowley desperately trying to put back the faith that he had lost himself.

He squeezes at the hand in his, desirous of conversation— of explanation— and swallows back that unceasing curiosity. The thing that had gotten him into so much trouble in the first place.

He tells himself that he will not enjoy whatever would come out of Aziraphale’s lips anyway— now that the world isn’t ending, now that they have to stare down the barrel of punishment for a transgression that has taught Crowley exactly nothing.

They are still nothing tangible. They are still moons apart. Held together by gravity and held apart by gravity. At perigee this time and still not touching.

But the failsafe in his chest hums, the link of their orbit glows. He will continue his circling of Aziraphale from a safer distance, admit no missing, confess no feeling. Nail that bit of himself once and for all beneath the floorboards. Shove it down the cellar stairs and lock the door. Forget the key.

He inhales and thinks instead of the sofa that they had tangled up on so many times. The sofa that has been cremated and laid to rest. A fitting tribute, he thinks, for the burial of his emotions.

“Angel,” he whispers, when they’ve reached London, “angel, we’re here.”

He stops himself from saying _home_. Because it isn’t home, not for Aziraphale. And he isn’t about to push him into anything anymore. Not now. Not now that he knows for sure that whatever is between them isn’t love— not like love as Crowley wants it— at least not from Aziraphale’s end. It is something else. Something beyond that. Some illusion that led others to believe that they occupy the same space labeled _love_ or maybe even check off the box that says _together_ but when in reality they exist within an abstract of something that has no name. A platonic intimacy perhaps. A marriage but only of convenience. The natural inclination for opposite ends of magnets to attract.

The strength of it tethers them-- there is a shocking sort of magic in the ease of familiarity. An unending nexus that arrives from their arresting differences. As if they were one person, at one point, split in two.

“ _Angel_ ,” he whispers again, and is struck with the heat in that nickname. A burn of practiced vocal muscles and six-thousand-years of forgetting names.

There is a shifting and another irritatingly charming noise and then Aziraphale is sitting upright, blinking blearily and looking down at their conjoined hands.

“Sorry,” he murmurs. “New body. Haven’t quite gotten it figured out yet.”

“S’okay,” Crowley says, and stands.

There is the natural inclination for their hands to separate but they _don’t_ and Crowley bites down on his tongue and stifles that bit of joy in their connection.

“Come on,” he says, when Aziraphale does not stand up. “This is our stop.”

So the hands split apart and they file off the bus that still says Oxford. They step out onto that familiar street and it is so shockingly normal that it doesn’t feel right— as if the world hadn’t nearly ended and as if nuclear armageddon hadn’t nearly erupted, buried this entire city under ash.

He can remember, once, bombs dropping here that had not been atomic.

Crowley stops and turns when he realizes Aziraphale is not beside him— realizes that he has stopped and is instead staring down the familiar junction that leads to the bookshop of one A.Z. Fell.

He back steps until he is beside him, touches softly at an elbow.

“We’ll rebuild it,” he says softly. “If you’d like.”

Aziraphale nods and says nothing and Crowley wishes that maybe, instead, they could rebuild themselves.

* * *

Crowley has keys that he does not use. He palms them anyway, pulls them out of a pocket.

There is the weight of the Bentley’s key swinging along with the one for his door and he tries not to look at it. It is easier to ignore the heat of that loss than to talk about it. As if such a loss means anything when he had nearly lost Aziraphale. When Aziraphale had lost the bookshop.

He swallows and steps inside and there’s mud in his entryway he had not cleaned up, there are smudges on the door handle. He forces himself to believe that Aziraphale will not care and then he looks down his long hallway.

There is still the steaming puddle of what used to be Ligur dissolving in the entryway to his office, the bucket that once held holy water rolling on the floor.

“What’re you—“ Aziraphale starts, stepping in behind him, and then, “ _oh_.”

“Sorry just— give me a moment will you?”

Crowley takes half a step towards the mess and then is instantly tethered by fingers wrapped around his forearm.

“ _Stop_ ,” he says, “let me do it.”

“No it’s— it’s _demon_ juice.”

“You’re not touching it,” Aziraphale says, with no room for arguing. Which Crowley, of course, takes as a challenge.

“Well neither are _you_ ,” he says, and reluctantly pulls his arm out of Aziraphale’s grip.

He makes it approximately one step forward before he is being unceremoniously shoved up against the nearest wall, a hand gathered up in his clothes.

There is a rush of heat— alarm first and arousal second— that pushes out from chest to cheeks to hips. And he has a sudden echoed memory of doing this to Aziraphale— _before_ — against the walls of a convent.

“I _said_ ,” Aziraphale commands, very firmly and very softly, “you are _not_ _touching it_.”

His eyes are entirely _green_ up this close. Like moss or seagrass and Crowley thinks of a garden, someday— the dream of a future one and the memory of a lost one. And then swallows that thought down and digests it. Removes it. Tells himself not to dream such things. Not anymore.

They are only green, he tells himself, because of the lighting in his hallway, the reflection of light off of so much stone.

Crowley pushes his hips back away from him, wishing there was more space. The angel does not need to know that he is entirely, embarrassingly aroused from being pinned against a wall.

Or maybe it’s the strength in that one hand. The way he is nearly on his toes and not supporting his own weight. The incredible proximity of those lips.

He nods and is probably staring too hard at his mouth.

“Sure,” Crowley says, and swallows, “okay.”

“Good,” he says, and lets him down.

There is a half moment where Crowley stares after him, at the turn of that fair head assessing the damage on the floor— and then he breaks away, turns instead toward a closet.

There is a door near his entryway that houses the mops, the brooms, the vacuums. He opens it and tries to ignore the twist in his chest at the sight of them. _When’re you gonna get a fucking vacuum, angel_?

“There’s—“ his voice catches and he tries again, “ _here_ ,” he says instead, pulling at a broom.

“We can sweep him into that bucket,” he says.

“ _We_ are not doing anything,” Aziraphale says, and takes the offered broom. “You are going to go order us something to eat. And not be anywhere near this— this _liquid_.”

There is nothing left of Ligur. _Nothing_. No clothing and no chameleon. No scales or eyes or fangs. He has turned the holy water black with his ichor, with the dissolution of his demonic energy.

Crowley feels tired and shaky and wrung entirely out. Spread entirely too thin. He rests a hand on the doorjamb and pulls at his own clothes, attempts to straighten them.

“Sure,” Crowley says, and does not look up from that gelatinous black sludge. “What shall I order?”

Aziraphale is not looking at him and instead waves a hand in thought.

“Sushi? Is that agreeable?”

Crowley lifts one shoulder and nods because he will not be eating it anyway.

“Sushi sounds good,” he agrees, because at least it is something cold and untouched by fire. Something he won’t have to sniff around the char of.

“K, I’ll just— be in the kitchen.”

But Aziraphale does not turn around and instead nods, bucket in one hand and broom in the other.

Crowley walks down his hallway and has the abrupt thought that that’s exactly what _he_ would’ve looked like, had he chosen to take that shot of holy water. Aziraphale would have come back and not been able to find him— would have perhaps searched until he broke in here like he had one-hundred years ago to find him sleeping on the ceiling.

But he would have instead found him like they had found Ligur— a highball glass on his desk and an orange peel on the floor— the tartan thermos like a cocktail shaker serving suicide liquid. His clothes dissolved down into nothing and his body dissolved down into nothing and he is abruptly overcome with gratitude. Gratitude for that choice he followed like the North Star, his _Polaris_ — the angel that gave him the atom bomb and then would have cleaned up after the detonation. Buried whatever was left of him perhaps in a garden.

There is a menu in one of his drawers and he opens it, tries to find it. But his vision is strangely blurry and his body is suddenly weary and he slides the drawer shut. Sags against the counter.

He breathes into his hands that still smell like smoke, tries to suck in air in his suddenly too-small kitchen. And he knows it’s another memory he won’t be able to shake, another brick in that wall. Because time doesn’t heal anything.

He could have died and Aziraphale _did_ die and the bookshop is still gone. That placeholder for their memories is gone. Fire has erased their shared past and there is no doubt about whether or not Aziraphale loves him. _Not like that_.

He tries to push that thought to the back of his throat and focus instead on the fact that he’s _here_ , in his flat, and that is _enough_.

“Crowley?”

How long has he been bent over like this, forearms on the counter and head in his hands? How long has he been trying to breathe as if he really needs to?

“Crowley— it’s alright.”

There are gentle hands cupped up around his shoulders, across his back, over those junctions where his wings would be.

“Come sit,” Aziraphale is saying, “just come lie down.”

And he knows the floor isn’t the place Aziraphale meant but that’s where they end up anyway— sinking down the cabinets until their backs are pressed against them and their feet touch at the toes, pressed together at the thigh.

“What is it?” He asks, and there are hands up on his wrists, cradling those bones.

Crowley pulls his hand down from his face and rests his head against the cabinet, exhales out some panic.

“Just a long day,” he says.

He can feel Aziraphale looking at him.

“Talk to me?”

He turns to find Aziraphale rather close, the sides of their foreheads leaning against the same cabinet door, eyes wide and deep and patient.

“That could have been me. On the floor,” he says.

Aziraphale is shaking his head.

“I wouldn’t have allowed it,” he says. “I would have stopped you.”

“You were gone,” Crowley manages. He tries to swallow but his throat won’t work. “I went to the bookshop.”

“You went— _oh_.”

“I tried to find you in it,” he says, and squeezes his eyes shut.

He can still feel it, still _smell_ it— the smoke like rejection has sunk into the fibers of his jacket, perhaps deeper to the fibers of himself. “And it took me a while to realize you weren’t there.”

There is a hand sliding into his again.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “that I wasn’t there.”

“Not your fault,” Crowley bites out, because Aziraphale doesn’t owe him an apology, not for this. Not for anything.

“It will all be okay,” Aziraphale is saying, and Crowley finds himself trying to believe it. He opens his eyes. Nails the floorboards shut. Tests the lock on the cellar door.

A hand comes up and touches at the arm of his glasses in silent question and he nods, lets them get pulled away. There are a handful of heartbeats that hang between them and Crowley thinks, for just a moment, that Aziraphale might lean forward— might brush his lips against his forehead.

But then the moment passes and he can breathe again, barely, and Aziraphale is speaking.

“Do you have a bath?”

“Of course,” he says, not knowing where this is going.

“I think you should show it to me.”

Crowley manages to raise an eyebrow at him.

“You smell like smoke,” Aziraphale says, by way of explanation.

And then Crowley catches his meaning, swallows back the bite of anxiety.

“Yeah,” he says, “let me show it to you.”

* * *

It is black and white and bare. There are no sundry bottles of cast-off hotel soaps, no bath potions, no colored towels. He has exactly one, plus a singular hand towel, in twin shades of the darkest black.

There is no bathtub, a fact that Aziraphale is clearly displeased with but not enough to voice— but there is instead a shower: a large glass thing with rainwater fixtures and a flat slope that shouldn’t have been enough to keep water from getting all over the floor but did anyway.

“Can I?”

There are hands coming from behind him, hooking into his jacket.

“Yeah,” he breathes, “course.” And it gets pulled off his arms, hung up on a hook.

His shirt goes, and then the belt— and then he is standing in his bathroom in his underwear and nothing else.

It feels different and he isn’t sure why. He feels more naked than he ever has been before— the intimacy diluted in the ocean of all those _it’s overs_ , that _I don’t even like you,_ one very resonate _we’re not friends_.

Or perhaps it is because Aziraphale is standing for the first time ever in a new body in his old bathroom. Something that less than twenty-four hours ago had seemed like an impossibility.

He isn’t sure what to do. How to hang his arms at his side. How to stand with his feet on the floor.

Nothing feels real and nothing feels _right_ , not like it used to. There is no ease to the way they fit together. Not with the unspoken finality of Aziraphale’s words severing whatever it is that they had. He does not love him. Not enough to run off together. _Not like that._

They are that woman in the box sawed in half and the legs are not lining up right anymore. The bisection has been inelegant.

He is exceedingly aware of the way his bones must look underneath his skin, of the way his shoulders are too broad and too skinny. They make near-right angles— sharp enough to cut.

It is little wonder, he thinks, that Aziraphale could not love him.

It is little wonder that Aziraphale is still completely clothed, turning on the tap, flooding the room with steam.

“Get in,” he says, when it’s hot.

Crowley does, with the underwear still on and his glasses on the sink and then there’s a hand on his wrist, pausing him.

“Wait— you can take those off— you know,” Aziraphale pauses, suddenly seeming unsure, “if you want.”

“Course I do,” Crowley says, “this _is_ my shower.”

Aziraphale pulls his hand away as if he’s been burned and Crowley bites his tongue, closes his eyes, regrets being so naked.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, and wishes for once that he was not built entirely out of barbs, regret, resentment.

“No, it’s— I understand,” Aziraphale whispers, and Crowley can see the pulse in his neck.

For the briefest moment it looks as though Aziraphale is about to climb in with him, fully clothed, and then he steps back, leans against the sink.

“I’ll just— I’ll go order us dinner,” he says, and it’s with a strange sort of hitch in his voice.

“Okay,” Crowley says, and steps into the hot water.

He does not know what to do and he does not know what to say. Crowley had laid his cards on the table a multitude of times and none of his hands had won. He has no ace up his sleeve.

The door clicks shut behind him and the lights are too bright, too _big_ , so he dims them down and then off.

He has, after all, always been easier to love in the dark.

* * *

The water from the kitchen tap is hot, instantly, and Aziraphale splashes it on his face, tries to breathe through the panic and breathe through his hands.

It isn’t supposed to go like this. It isn’t supposed to be this difficult. He is sailing without a map and it is not night yet— there are no stars to guide himself by. _Polaris_ , he thinks, is no longer visible.

He breathes down into the pristine kitchen sink, hands grasping at the edge of it.

Bathing is their safe place— it’s the place they had always found ease in, had always fallen back on. Crowley could strip off those clothes he wore like armor and show Aziraphale the surprising softness of his belly, the bit of scarred skin on his hip, his shoulder, his arm. He could trace the roadmap of their shared experiences and exist for small moments in those memories.

But Crowley is _jagged_ now, hurt. Barbed within walls of distrust and unease and Aziraphale has not felt the staggering pull of his emotion, not since that sudden swelling of it at the air base, at the abrupt appearance of his new body.

Something is locked down, hidden beneath the floorboards.

And it’s going to bleed, Aziraphale knows, when he finally pulls them up.

He straightens up on his arms, face dripping, and stares down into the sink.

There is one last distance to run, one last hurdle to cross. They will have to pour themselves into each other’s skin and sink down into the marrow of the other, pull off a convincing enough illusion that their head offices believe they have transcended sides, believe they should not be interfered with.

“And then what?” He murmurs, and water drips off his nose.

He has no home. No Heaven, no bookshop, no Crowley. He has managed to destroy each of those lifelines until there is no place soft and warm to crawl back to. There is no Eden and there is no garden and there is no _Polaris_ to get him there. It will lead him in circles. A map to nowhere.

He knows what he must do but the fear of it sticks to him, pushes out of him like sweat. There have been six thousand years of perceived rejection. Six thousand years of unrequited emotion. He is a coward and a fool and he wonders if he is even capable of setting things right. Lifetimes of wrongdoing won’t be erased in three words.

He wipes at his face with the sleeve of his jacket, stares down at the water mark.

His bookshop is gone. All of his clothes are gone. Vanished. He swallows. Steels himself.

And then he pulls at his bowtie, carefully unbuttons his shirt. The coat slides off and the shirt slides off and he folds them all carefully, places them on the counter. He toes off his shoes, and then the socks, and then he is standing barefoot in Crowley’s kitchen. Dressing himself down.

Crowley deserves to have him kneel at his feet. He deserves to be the one who knows how Aziraphale feels and to say nothing back. He deserves knowledge— the thing he represents above all else, the thing he questioned at until he was cast down from Heaven and forced to crawl on his belly for the transgression.

 _You only ever wanted to know_ , Aziraphale thinks, and tugs his trousers down his legs.

He’d kept that knowledge from him for so long, had guarded it not with a flaming sword but with tight lips and no kisses. A shuttering of public displays of affection and a fear to speak it even in the dark.

He is naked in Crowley’s kitchen and stares down the dark hallway. The light from the bathroom has been turned off but he can still hear the musical sound of water on tile, the echo of empty space.

He pads silently down the hallway and his heart is _ceaseless_ — demanding and reckless and pounding in his throat. His lungs are greedy in their suck for air. His skin prickles in the cold.

He presses both palms flat on the closed door to the bathroom, closes his eyes and _breathes_.

And then he pushes it open, allows himself to walk inside and get swallowed whole by the black.

“Crowley?”

There is a bend of golden light filtering through the single window, illuminating the tile floor. He can see the lambent edges of the glass door, the shine of the metal shower grate, the wet reflective breadth of Crowley’s shoulders. 

He blinks wildly, wishing he could see in the dark.

Crowley is sitting on the floor of the shower, his head cradled in his knees.

“You can turn the light on,” he says, and does not move.

“Crowley I—“

The words get suctioned out of his throat, seized in the thirst of his lungs.

“I have to talk to you—“

He stumbles into the shower enclosure, nearly trips on Crowley on the floor.

The water is outrageously hot and he sucks in a surprised breath as he steps into it.

“You can turn it down,” Crowley says, “the temp.”

“No it’s— it’s fine,” he says, and lowers himself to the floor.

There is nothing here but darkness and the silvery glow of Crowley’s wet skin in the black. A single point of illumination in a field of dark. A _Polaris_ , he thinks, _follow it home_.

He reaches out a tentative hand, lets it hover between his shoulder blades.

There are wings there— somewhere— tucked away in the firmament, black and iridescent like a thousand raven-wings, like those clothes he wears, the ones on the floor outside the shower, stinking like smoke.

His hand hovers there, over that point— and then presses against him softly.

The skin and muscle and bone beneath his hand tighten immediately, flex straight. It rends something from Aziraphale’s chest, rips something loose in his throat.

“Crowley,” he breathes, “I— I never should have—“

There is dizziness and regret, pain and disorientation. Why are words so foreign in his mouth— he is speaking a language he does not remember forgetting.

“I said such terrible things,” he says, and the burn in the back of his throat travels to behind his eyes.

Crowley is saying nothing, _nothing_ — vanished in the dark. A part of Aziraphale sawed off and unresponsive.

He can’t speak. The words die in his throat.

He has spent a very careful hundred years _not_ saying it, closing himself off, never allowing himself to breathe. And he can’t feel it— not anymore— that brush of Crowley’s emotions in the dark are shockingly silent.

“This,” he gasps, in suddenly empathy, “is how you felt. All those years.”

He is dizzy and panicked and he suddenly wishes for the lights to be on. For the curtain to open. Reveal every card hiding up a sleeve. Show the whole damn trick to the whole fucking audience.

His hand slides off of Crowley’s wet back and lands on the tile next to him. His head swims with not enough oxygen and not enough time— dawn perhaps coming soon and they still have skin to swap, Heaven and Hell to fool.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley breathes, and it is not without kindness.

“Yes?” He gasps, because he can do nothing else.

“Turn the light on or I will,” he murmurs.

He tries to snap his fingers and summon up a miracle but his fingers are too wet, he cannot pull anything down from Heaven.

There is an unsteady exhale from Crowley in front of him and then the slide of light rising up in the room.

“You hate the dark,” he says, and his hair is nearly black when wet.

He wishes Crowley would turn around, look at him, pull the answers out of his mouth.

“Not always,” he says softly. “I don’t have your… peculiar set of extras though,” Aziraphale adds, and tries to find a smile. He can’t though, and the remembered turn of phrase feels suddenly like ash in his mouth, because Aziraphale’s _peculiar set of extras_ included an ability to feel and Crowley’s had not.

“No,” Crowley turns his head a bit and Aziraphale can see the glow of his golden eyes over his shoulder, “you don’t.”

And it hits him then— how he had been so very proficient at telling Crowley lies, at telling him _it’s over_ and telling him _we’re not friends_ but had never been any good at telling him the true things, the actual things. The things that sound in English like _I love you_ but also cannot be distilled down into three words and three syllables. The things that feel like comfort and being absolutely yourself, like no lies and no secrets.

“Can we go back?” Aziraphale spits out, the words surprising even himself.

“Go back?” Crowley murmurs, and Aziraphale can see the question in the joining of his eyebrows.

There is a bar of white soap lying forgotten on the shower floor and Aziraphale reaches for it, pushes it up against Crowley’s skin.

He tightens up immediately, muscles stretching taut.

“To how things used to be,” he says, hushed, and rubs circles into his back with the bar. “Before I said all of that stuff at the bandstand and then again at the shop and—“

“Yes,” Crowley says, soft and swift and hot. “Yes, we can go back.”

Aziraphale exhales and bends forward until his forehead butts against the slick heat of Crowley’s spine, leaning fully into the spray of the too-hot water and baptizing himself in its heat.

“Thank you,” he breathes out against the bones there.

The back softens, the muscles relax. Aziraphale pulls back and scrubs at that smooth expanse of skin, wants to kiss every inch of it.

“Do you forgive me?” He asks, so softly it is almost not heard over the sound of water on tile, on skin.

“Nothing to forgive, really.”

Aziraphale draws out words on his back with the soap, lets them get washed away. It will be easier, he thinks, to just say it all at once. Spit it out. Let the language be mangled by this tongue that cannot shape the words he has never said. The words he has been _forbidden_ to say. He will force his throat to move. He has no practice at it. Let it be imperfect.

“Crowley I—“

“Don’t say it,” Crowley whispers, interrupting him, and Aziraphale’s ears prickle with the echo of his own voice, “you don’t have to say it.”

He stares down at that stretch of pale back— the scapula shifting beneath his skin. A scar he does not recognize is etched between the bones of his shoulders. Freckles like stars scatter across the reach of his spine.

Aziraphale folds himself neatly around that pale form, arms threading around his waist, up across that narrow belly and pulling him tight into the cradle of his chest. Heart against rib against back. He presses his cheek into the flat plane of his shoulder blade, closes his eyes as water beats down.

They had stood together once on that garden wall and had pressed their shoulders together when the first rain had fallen— before they had even known what rain was. His wing had brushed across the black of Crowley’s shoulder and he had felt it— even then— a warmth in his chest that had not come from himself.

There is a trickle of it, now, that tight crack of light that belongs to someone else.

Aziraphale presses a kiss into that skin beneath his cheek.

There’s an unfolding then— Crowley twisting in his arms and unweaving their limbs. He stands and takes Aziraphale with him.

“When did you get undressed?” He asks.

“In your kitchen,” he says, “I hope that’s okay.”

Crowley is looking down and around and brushing a hand across the dampened fluff of hair across his chest.

“Best thing those cabinets have ever seen,” he murmurs, and there is that familiar pull in the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile, _not yet._

“I doubt it,” Aziraphale says, swallowing, “bit soft around the—“

A hand covers his mouth.

“Best thing they’ve ever seen,” he repeats, and pulls his hand away.

He is still wearing the underwear— black and clinging to him in such a way that it requires no imagination to envision what is underneath. There is that line of shockingly bright hair leading into them and it’s all too much and not enough at the same time.

He flattens himself into Crowley’s chest, presses the warmth of their bellies together.

A cheek presses into the side of his forehead, a mouth moves against his skin.

“Feels like you,” it says.

“Does it?” Aziraphale asks, breathless.

“Yeah, angel,” he says, “it does.”

And then he is pulling away, turning off the tap, something set in his shoulders

“Come on,” he says, “we have a lot to talk about.”

* * *

“I am not sure,” Crowley says, “logistically how this is going to work.”

They had shared the singular black bath towel and it is now lying discarded between them on the kitchen counter. Aziraphale is tugging on a sock.

“Have you ever… possessed someone?” He asks.

Crowley scuffs his bare foot on the floor, looks down.

“‘Course I have.”

“I imagine it will be a bit like that. Only—“ Aziraphale waves a hand, looks distractedly across the kitchen, “you know, I’ll possess you at the same time.”

Crowley chews at his lip.

“I have to say— I’m not a fan of the idea of you going down to Hell.”

“Well, I’m not too keen on you going up to Heaven.”

Crowley shifts his shoulders in his too-large shirt.

“I’ll be fine. I’ve been there before. It’s _you_ I’m worried about.”

Aziraphale has managed to tug on his undershirt and the wetness of his belly sinks through it, the cotton stretching transparent across his skin. Crowley stares at it perhaps a bit too long.

“Yes but— I’m _certain_ they’ll use hellfire on me and—“ He glances up at Crowley across the span of white countertop. “Will you be okay?”

He can tell the color of his eyes has seeped out to the very edges. There is no white there— not after this long day and this long night. He has no energy left to pretend to be human and he wishes he hadn’t left his glasses in the bathroom.

“You know me,” he says, “I’m fireproof.”

But there is no mirth in his voice and Aziraphale plainly catches it, can probably see the frown across his forehead, the grim set to his spine. He lowers his voice and tries again.

“I’ll be fine,” he says.

And then something that he says comes back around, emerging unbidden in his throat.

“Angel,” he says, and threads his eyebrows together. “There’s something you should know.”

Aziraphale stops his pulling on of the remaining sock and glances up at him, bent at the waist and wide-eyed.

“What is it?”

Crowley digs a hand through his wet hair, lets it flop back down over his eyes.

“If… if we do this—“

“—we _have_ to,” Aziraphale interrupts.

Crowley looks up at him through his eyelashes, across the white kitchen from him, back in his own body and suddenly so close. He wants to reach out, touch every inch of him, make sure he’s still real. 

Aziraphale’s hair is so much longer when wet. The curls of it hang down across his forehead, drip onto his cheeks.

“ _When_ we do this,” he ameliorates, “you,” he swallows, pauses, takes a breath, “you’re gonna have to sink.”

Aziraphale straightens, then blinks, then opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again.

“ _Sink_?”

Crowley fits his teeth together, draws his eyebrows in.

“Sink, angel.”

“Yes, I heard you— what do you mean, _sink_?”

Crowley looks down at the counter again.

“When we go to our respective head offices— it’s _water_. The floor.”

Aziraphale looks confused. Like he has never really taken notice. He opens his mouth again, closes it.

“To get down to Hell,” Crowley says gently, because the look in Aziraphale’s eyes is already so confused, “you have to sink.”

Aziraphale looks up, shifts back and forth.

“You mean… all those times we’d take the front door— and I’d go up and you’d go down— you were actually _sinking_?”

Crowley shrugs a single shoulder.

“Yeah. You know. It’s like a litmus test. Checking for proper demonic acidity.”

Aziraphale inhales unsteadily and looks around the kitchen, back at Crowley.

“H— how do I sink?”

Crowley tongues along his incisors, feeling the cut of them, the sharpness. He presses a palm down onto the counter, between them.

“You can’t have faith.”

The color drains abruptly from Aziraphale’s face. His lips move but there is no sound. He looks down at Crowley’s hand between them, on the white counter, stares at the shape of it unmoving.

“Renounce— I— I _can’t_.”

Crowley grinds his teeth together, breathes out through his nose.

“You _have_ to. Just to get in. Otherwise… we might as well not even— there will be no _point_ if we can’t get into each other’s sides.”

“But then,” Aziraphale looks up, his eyes flitting between Crowley’s. “That means I _float_.”

“Yeah,” Crowley lets his shoulders relax, rolls the tension out of them. “The whole walk on water bit.”

“That means you’ll— you’ll have to _find_ faith.”

Crowley lets the lines of his face soften too, licks out a tongue to wet his lips.

“I know,” he says, “you’re gonna have to teach me.”


	9. pas de deux

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all the love to the wonderful rfsmiley for being an incomparable happy-beta <3

It is just beginning to snow. 

It dusts the window-ledges and it dusts the sidewalks. Just enough to stick and disappear beneath shoes— a map of footprints leading down the streets. Many-colored holiday lights have appeared along the storefronts, have wrapped themselves around railings. 

A bit of them festoon the exterior window that they are sitting inside of, bedeck Aziraphale in a chromatic and shifting kaleidoscope of pinks, yellows, greens. 

It looks particularly charming bouncing along the white of his curls, dyeing them a momentary rainbow. 

Crowley picks up the warm ceramic of his cup, tilts it down his throat. Saki is nice, he thinks, heat without much burn. He has had enough of burning. 

“I’m sorry I never ordered out,” Aziraphale is saying, a napkin pressing to the corner of his mouth. “I got… distracted.”

“Too busy getting naked in my kitchen,” Crowley comments, swirling the liquid in his glass. 

Aziraphale blanches across from him.

“I wouldn’t put it _quite_ like that,” he says.

Crowley straightens his glasses and looks up at Aziraphale. His curls are still damp and his skin is still _pink_ , all of it, his cheeks and his neck and his ears. A flush from the hot water of the shower that has yet to dissipate.

He clamps down on the heat in his stomach, swallows the arousal before it can flare. 

“I have an idea,” he says, by means of distraction. 

“An idea?” Aziraphale has always been incredible at diction— a delightful talent for enunciating each syllable and biting them off crisp with his teeth. 

“For the whole— sinking bit,” he says, and folds his arms across his chest. 

“Ah,” Aziraphale’s eyebrows rise and then fall and he pushes his plate away from him.

“You’re not going to like it,” Crowley bites out.

“I don’t suspect I will,” he says. “But I suppose it’s necessary.”

“It is.” He pauses. “Thought of how to get me to float yet?”

Aziraphale turns his head and looks out at the snow falling on the street, the accumulation of it on the sill of the window they sit beside. 

“Not yet,” he says. 

They pay and they leave and they walk— away from Crowley’s flat and down a familiar alleyway. One that leads to that certain stretch of street that splinters— back towards Mayfair or left towards Soho. Crowley had stood here once, in the rain and in the cold, had stood here after coming home from France, a hundred years ago. He had smoked his last cigarette and had missed Aziraphale with a strength that defied language. 

He nails those floorboards shut. 

“Crowley,” Aziraphale is saying, “where are we going?”

“Have some faith,” he says.

“I thought I was supposed to be losing it,” Aziraphale murmurs. 

“Just— follow me.”

So he does— follows him down the increasingly slick city streets. Down alleys and down sidewalks, beneath shop signs and into the increasingly familiar charm of Soho. Candy shops and chocolatiers, haberdasheries, _bookshops_.

“Oh,” Aziraphale says, and slows suddenly behind him.

“Yes,” Crowley says, and another weight gets added to the heaviness in his chest. 

There has only been one time in their six-thousand year friendship that he has seen Aziraphale teeter on the edge of his faith. He had been naked and shell-shocked and perched on the ledge of that certain porcelain soaking tub. The one they had both been in too many times to count. The one that no longer exists. 

So he will show him the ruined building, the desecration of their memories. He will hold his hand and lead him into the place that smells like burnt book-glue and curling water-soaked pages. Show him all of the things he has collected for hundreds of years all laid to ruin beneath an element they both are able to wield in their hands. Show him that doing the morally right thing awards no protection. Offers no help. There is no plan.

“I’m sorry,” Crowley says, and reaches back for his palm, something to grab onto and lead into darkness. 

It finds his and squeezes and follows him—

—down the darkened street— the streetlamp outside the shop dimmed out and there is no illumination here. Not anymore.

Aziraphale stutters and then stops and his shoes slide a bit on the snow beneath his feet because his bookshop is suddenly in view except it’s _not_. The fair exterior of his shop is black, all of it, what little of it remains standing. There is the broken glass with his human pseudonym cracked and shimmering in the street. Blown out by fire or the water they had used to put out the blaze. 

It crunches under his shoes and under the snow as he steps closer, stares up at the pillars that used to hold his door. He closes his eyes. He has stood here a million times and had taken them all for granted. 

Crowley had come here once— when he first bought the place— with chocolates and with flowers, and something about the foolish grand romanticism of the gesture had irritated him then and stings him now. 

Stings him because what he wouldn’t give for that time back. Crowley outside with confections and a smile, hopeful and unrelentingly bright, a bookshop not-yet filled with their memories. 

He opens his eyes, walks across that threshold, into the place that used to be his home. 

Only there is no ringing of the bell above his door, there is no gleaming parquet floor in the backroom. There is no longer an oil stain, he notices, on the carpet by the stairs because there is no longer what one could consider a carpet there at all. Nor are there really stairs. There is instead the burnt husk of the only place he had ever truly called home. The shelled remainder of his personal history— the artifacts of his time on earth. His clothing is all gone save for what remains on his back, his books are gone, his sofa is gone. All of it vanished. There is no magic trick. There will be no reveal. 

The rabbit has been shoved back into the hat and the trick is over, he knows, the audience has gone home. 

He runs his fingers along the edge of what used to be their sofa. The place where they had spent so much time and drank so many bottles of wine. The place where Crowley had told him _you’re gonna fucking kill me, angel_ and had fallen apart in his lap. The place where they had cloistered themselves for an entire week while the humans raced to the moon. 

He turns and sees Crowley— his own moon— hovering behind him, standing near what used to be the register. 

Crowley had bent him over the edge of it once— had serviced him for nearly a half hour with tongue first, then fingers, then _Crowley_ — all Crowley. And Aziraphale hadn’t been able to sit comfortably for the next few days but it had been an ache he had tried to hold onto. 

And it’s gone— the register itself is a molten metallic catastrophe, the table it sits on is carbonized. He wonders dimly if Crowley’s glasses are still inside the till. If the number of his Mayfair address is still visible. 

“I’m sorry,” Crowley says, and he is standing over that place on the floor where they had removed the planks, ripped up the nails. They had hidden books in there and maybe other things too— secrets and longings and desires. 

Crowley had cradled his cheek in his hand there once— had swiped the rough pad of his thumb beneath his eye and removed a rogue eyelash, had offered it up to Aziraphale to blow away and make a wish. 

“It’s not your fault,” Aziraphale says, and his heart seems to have migrated to his throat. 

He had wanted to tell him back then that he had wished for more time. That he had wished for the garden again and for another six-thousand year stretch where they both started off running. Missed no beats. Made love the whole time.

“I’m sorry I brought you here,” Crowley says again, and won’t look him in the eye. 

But Crowley had told him back then _if you tell me it won’t come true_. And Aziraphale had wanted it with an ache that was furious in its desire, so he had said nothing. 

“It’s—“ Aziraphale inhales and tries to remove the sudden and inexplicable amount of moisture in his eyes. “It’s okay,” he breathes. “I needed to see it.”

“There’s no plan, angel,” Crowley murmurs. “She isn’t watching any of us.” 

And Aziraphale feels it then— the crack. The splintering of everything he has ever known. An ache in his head and a heaviness in his heart. And he feels it because it’s _true_ — She hasn’t been watching them. Not once. Not in that tent in Austria-Hungary and not in that field in Passchendaele. Not in America, in that ocean of prairie grass and not on that flat rock in Spain. 

He is an orphan. The same as Crowley. Perhaps he has been this entire time. 

He sinks to his knees on the floor and is probably marring up his last set of clean clothes, the trousers he has kept for the last two hundred years and lovingly stitched buttons onto, let down hems and raised them up with the changing fashion of shoes. 

And it has all been for nothing— Crowley has been right all along. None of it had meant anything. There is no plan, there is no watcher. There has not been a guiding hand to any of this.

There has been, instead, a self-imposed fantasy. An adherence to rules someone else had made up and stuck to against all else. To the detriment of himself and to the detriment of Crowley. And the book of Genesis might be writ beneath his skin, Revelation might have been shoved into his throat— but he can choose not to read it, he can choose not to swallow it. Fate, he considers, is the line that pulls them into the future— but he can cut it at anytime. 

And isn’t it something, he thinks, to find out he’s had a choice in it, all of it, all along. 

He looks up and can see Crowley’s copper hair catching the shine of a distant streetlight, can see the translucent pink of his ear backlit against the black. He is looking down at those floorboards and perhaps all the things they had stored there. Both of them. Unwittingly. 

There has only ever been Crowley, he thinks, just Crowley, the entire time. 

He inhales, fills up his lungs, holds it there for what is probably too long. 

And then exhales into the cremated remains of the bookshop, something cracking loose—

—and rattling around his chest cavity. Aziraphale is still kneeling on the old parquet floor of the bookshop, something like tears in his eyes and pain on his face, staring at him hungrily.

 _I’m sorry_ , he wants to say, _for all of it_. 

Sorry for the nights he had stayed too long and the days he hadn’t left at all. Always hanging around the bookshop, around Aziraphale, watching him eat and watching him read. Aziraphale always brushing him off, warning about being watched, hands holding only beneath table tops and fingers brushing only in the passing of cups, the holding of doors, the lighting of cigarettes. 

He knows in his heart it has all been for nothing, there is no hope, there is no one watching. She made them and divided them and left them on this chunk of rock hurtling through space to figure it out themselves. 

There had been a book they had buried beneath the floorboards here once. One by a theosophist who thought perhaps that soulmates were just people who had gotten split in two, spent their days in suffering and their nights in suffering because they could not find their missing half. 

And it is all bollocks, he thinks, because he had found his missing half six-thousand years ago and he still spends his nights and his days suffering. Because once you saw a woman in half she will always bear a scar, a line where she can never line up quite the same way again. The legs will always remember what it felt like to not have a heart. 

“Come on,” he says, because he has seen enough of Aziraphale suffering for a million lifetimes and he will not easily forgive himself for doing this, not even if it is for their own survival. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Our sofa,” Aziraphale says softly, as if it was ever actually _theirs_ and not just _his_. “We spent… a _lot_ of time there.”

“We did,” Crowley agrees, and refuses to look at the calcined pitch of it, lurching in front of them. 

“We can go back?” He asks again, like that time in the shower. Crowley isn’t sure exactly what he is asking— for the sex or the domesticity or the friendship. He isn’t sure if he means the sleight of hand, the brushing of fingers over cups of coffee. Or if he means the not-talking, the not-quite-friends with numerous benefits, an Arrangement that had been birthed to let Crowley hang around. 

“Yes,” he answers anyway, because he may have nailed his heart beneath those floorboards and he may have scraped clean the plate of his emotions, but he will give up the fire in his fingertips and the immortality in his veins if it means Aziraphale in front of him, touchable, in any form. 

“We’ll have another sofa,” Aziraphale says.

“You will, yes.”

“And we’ll sit it on and drink wine.”

“Of course.”

Crowley reaches down a hand and Aziraphale takes it, lets himself be pulled to his feet. 

He holds onto it a moment longer than strictly necessary, looks Aziraphale in the eye. 

“When you walk through that front door, do not hesitate,” he says, and squeezes the hand in his. “You hold onto this feeling and remember that there is no plan, it doesn’t mean anything. Don’t let them catch you floating for a second.”

Aziraphale is nodding and dazed and his eyes are so wide, so wet, so _blue_ in this darkness. He wants to reach out and tug him into his chest, envelop him between the bones of his ribs, keep him safe in the cage of them there. 

“Yes,” he says, “okay.”

“Good.” Crowley brushes at Aziraphale’s shoulders, at the snow that is building there. The angel’s knees are dirty from kneeling on the floor, black and wet. 

“Come on,” he says, “let’s go back. You can figure out how to make me float.”

Aziraphale nods and moves toward the door, doesn’t look back. 

They make it across the street and it is nearly midnight, there are no cars on the road. The numbers on Crowley’s wrist change their faces and he shivers into his jacket. His knees protest the weather. 

Aziraphale is quiet beside him, across the street now, taking refuge beneath a storefront overhang. The Christmas lights in the window twinkle and change color, red to green, yellow to blue. A plastic Santa Claus waves at them from behind the glass. 

And then he looks over to Aziraphale, to see the angel staring at him strangely. 

“What?” He says, because Aziraphale looks both awed and inspired and that isn’t why he brought him here— he brought him here to lose that faith, that awed inspiration. 

But Aziraphale is saying nothing, his eyes wide and his mouth parted and there is a sudden prickling energy to the air, his heart so abruptly strong in his chest. 

“Crowley,” he says softly, and reaches up—

—pulls off the sunglasses without asking and he is probably going to be upset, he is probably going to be mad. He survives beneath those sunglasses but Aziraphale can’t have him wearing that battle armor, not right now, and he suddenly doesn’t have the grace to ask nicely. 

Because this is it. Crowley has shaken something loose. 

_You can figure out how to make me float_. 

The thought hangs in the air, becomes suddenly clear. Thousand-year puzzle pieces sliding into place. 

There had been no red-chalk hill. The hourglass has been smashed.

This is the secret that he has been holding onto since the beginning of time. The key that Aziraphale has held in his hands since the start.

_I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on that great serpent._

He is that angel in the Book of Revelation assigned with that sacred task. Only the world hadn’t ended. They hadn’t met up on that red-chalk hill. _Via Maris_ has been watered only with rain. The key, he thinks wildly, is himself. 

The street is slippery and the snow is falling and there is no one here— not at midnight on an all-together too cold evening with the streetlights out and the holiday lights on. No one watching. No one has _ever been watching_. No Heaven. No Hell. Not here. He is an orphan and he is finally, _finally_ free. 

He can say it. 

He can _finally_ say it.

He blinks and swallows and his heart is _so_ loud, so strong. Strong enough that he feels rocked by the rhythm of it, carried on that tide, beholden of nothing. 

He steps up close to him, closer than they have ever been together on this street, in public— Crowley stiffening and straightening and he doesn’t know how to react. Aziraphale can see the confusion in his eyes. He slips the glasses into his pocket, reaches up both hands and can taste blood in the back of his throat, iron in his mouth, his heartbeat tucked up in his neck. 

He can remember Crowley’s voice from one-hundred years ago. _I beg of you that you would. If the time ever came— I’d rather it be you._ And at the time he’d thought it meant death— to kiss that star-freckled forehead and squeeze him until the life went out, to present him with a gift of holy water in a vacuum-sealed thermos. But he realizes now that the time has come and it _is_ going to be him, _Aziraphale_ , only it doesn’t mean death. It means _faith_. 

He is smiling and his fingers cup around the angles of Crowley’s jaw, his thumbs press gentle against his cheek— those good bones, those beautiful edges. 

“Angel,” Crowley starts and startles and begins to pull back, “what’re you doing?”

“ _Anthony_ ,” he just says, and there is suddenly so much breath in Crowley’s chest at the sound of his name that Aziraphale never uses, that he has finally gotten used to. 

There is snow in his hair, on his copper eyelashes and the tips of his ears. He opens his mouth to speak and is alarmed at the lack of blockage, the ease of his vocal chords. A language he is assuredly fluent in. He feels shockingly, entirely brilliant. Resplendent. _Complete._

Maybe no one is watching, he thinks, but everything, all of it, has happened for a reason. 

He rubs his left thumb in tiny— 

—circles beneath his eye, on his skin, smudging in a bit of the cold and a bit of the snow and he does not know what Aziraphale is doing, _why is he so close_. 

He feels disarmed, off balance, _unsteady_. Why is his heart so noisy, his feet so numb, his chest rollicking with the forced labor of his lungs. 

He says nothing, because what is there to say when Aziraphale is this close, an ache in his knees and he can feel every bit of space between his ribs— his heart a mad beating thing locked under those floorboards and shivering to get out.

“There is something you should know,” Aziraphale says, and his voice is soft and unafraid. 

A breeze blows snow between them. The colored lights shine gold. 

“I love you.”

Three words and three syllables and Crowley isn’t sure he understands. This is a language he’s been forbidden to speak, has never heard spoken aloud, not by the only voice that matters. 

“I have loved you every day since the very first day.”

He cannot feel anything and he thinks, wildly, that they must have been found out, discorporated. He is not sure he is breathing. 

“Just… took me some time to realize it.”

Aziraphale is blinking and there is water on his cheek that has not come from the sky, snowflakes on his nose. 

Crowley stares at it and the suck of his veins is painful in its intensity. Those floorboards crack.

“I should have told you sooner.”

There is no voice in his throat, no sound in his lungs. He cannot speak and he is vaguely aware that those hands on his face have migrated down to cup around his shoulders. Thumbs in his clavicles. Fingers rubbing on his skin.

“And I know you have loved me the entire time. All of it. I’ve always felt it and— I should’ve told you sooner—“ 

This is the part where it looks like Aziraphale can’t breathe, like the language has run out. He is staring at the hollow of his throat like there is an answer there and something restarts in Crowley’s chest, kickbacks reality. A sledgehammer straight to the wall and straight to the floorboards. Rip them both up. He has a safe place called home. 

“I would very much like to kiss you,” Aziraphale says. “If that would be okay.”

And this is it. This is where it finally happens. Here in front of a burnt-down bookshop, the ashes of their memories still floating in the air. Here after walls and world wars and and countless starlit evenings, a thousand drunken nights tied up in each other’s limbs on the sofa, the floor, occasionally the bed. Here after kissing every inch of skin that had not been _lips_. Here after all those cups of coffee, all those shared cigarettes— here after something like two million-one-hundred-and-ninety mornings— it is midnight and it is snowing but the sun, _the sun_ , finally, is shining. 

Aziraphale steps closer and those hands slide back up to his jaw, the nape of his neck, cup him against him as if Crowley is something precious and breakable and utterly, entirely drinkable. Not poison and not blinding and he closes his eyes as it happens, as Aziraphale’s nose slots into place next to his, as those lips press and it is _better_ than any wine-glass etching, it is better than he had ever imagined. 

There are kisses, he thinks wildly. There might someday be wedding rings. There will be breakfasts together in bed and Sunday afternoons wrapped up on their new sofa, doing the crossword. There will be the mingling of toothbrushes kissing in the same sink-side cup— a word, perhaps, like _husband_ to define him someday. 

Aziraphale tastes like sunshine and softness and Crowley is a cup, emptied and refilling and running ceaselessly over— there is liquid between their mouths and he isn’t sure whose tears they are, isn’t sure who is making that subvocal sound, isn’t sure he has the capacity to understand anything besides the lock of their bodies at the one point they have never touched. 

They do not need air but they pull back, eventually, anyway. Long enough to look from lips to eyes to lips again and then hurry back together, a multiplied freneticism, teeth knocking and mouths opening and Crowley would like very much to swallow him down— push him against the glass of this unsuspecting hardware shop and never let go again.

And he does— nearly— backing him up until Aziraphale bumps into the storefront and then he stops, pulls back. Pulls back because there is something bright creeping in beneath his closed eyes and it is _dark_ on this street so why—

He peels apart his eyes and there’s _light_ — brilliant and gold in a perfect circle around Aziraphale’s head.

“Angel,” he breathes, and can’t look away from it. 

“Yes,” Aziraphale says, and there’s _joy_ in his face and pink in his cheeks and Crowley remembers once a story about a zoo and a flamingo— an angel who couldn’t contain his excitement. “I suppose I still am.”

There is so much tightness up so high in his throat, a sublime happiness that feels like it is about to spill out of his eyes, nose, mouth.

And then Aziraphale’s thumb smudges across his cheek, as if there is wetness there that they are not going to talk about, and says very quietly: “ _yours_ though.”

Crowley presses their foreheads together and gasps and tries to remember how lungs work, if hearts are supposed to beat this way. 

“Mine?” he asks, because he cannot quite believe it, not yet. 

“I’ve never been anything else.”

There is air between them where it shouldn’t be, Crowley thinks, and closes the distance between them. A woman sawed in half may bear those marks of her separation but it feels better than being cut in two. Scars are forgotten and eventually stop aching. Time, perhaps, will heal this wound. They are finally speaking a language they both understand with perfect fluidity, a mother tongue in matching twin accents. 

The floorboards rip up and the blood pours out and he is getting it all over Aziraphale’s hands, he knows— he must be drowning in it, like he has probably been drowning in it this whole time, from the very start. 

He pulls back, tries to find air, cups his hands up frantically along Aziraphale’s cheeks, his curls, his jaw. 

“You—“ he gasps and blinks because _why_ is there so much liquid in his eyes, “you knew? This whole time?”

Aziraphale grabs at the hands up by his face, rubs his cheek into the palm.

“The whole time.”

“And you didn’t—“

“I thought you knew,” he says, breathless. “I didn’t realize you couldn’t feel it. Not until the convent and—”

Those eyes close and Crowley leans until their foreheads kiss again, until they are breathing in the same air.

“Peculiar set of extras,” Crowley murmurs, and Aziraphale nods into those hands.

“You’re my mirror,” he says. “We have what the other lacks.” 

Crowley pulls back to see him, all of him.

“You cannot believe,” Aziraphale says, and those eyes are shifting along with the lights, “that you and I are coincidence.”

It hits him then, squarely in the chest. A race of cold runs up his arms and his heart pumps something like battery acid into his veins. 

“You think— you and I are—“

“Someone made us this way.”

And he’s never subscribed to the idea of destiny, has despised it always— but looking at Aziraphale with his halo glowing and his cheeks so pink, staring at him as if Crowley is worthy and drinkable and _not_ unlovable, not something _too sharp_ or _too broken_ — he might begin to believe. 

He thinks of those theosophists locked under the floorboards in Aziraphale’s bookshop, thinks maybe they had been on to something. Maybe She who sculpted Aziraphale out of all that stardust and sunshine wasn’t so terrible after all. Maybe She’d put him at the eastern gate because She knew how much Crowley loved the sunrise. 

“When you walk into that office building,” Aziraphale says, breathless and lovely and beautiful and _his_ , all his. “I want you to remember this feeling. _Don’t sink._ Not even for a second.”

Crowley is nodding and his fingers are in Aziraphale’s hair, by his ear, and it still feels new— six-thousand years and he still hasn’t gotten enough. Not now. Not yet. Not ever. 

“I— I don’t know what to do,” he admits, quietly. “It’s been so long. I don’t know how to— I’m not sure I’ll be any good at—“

A hand comes up and covers his mouth. 

“Best thing I’ve ever seen,” Aziraphale says, an echo of earlier. 

Crowley kisses the palm over his mouth, is thrilled when it does not pull away. 

“I can kiss you,” he mouths against his skin, and the hand comes down.

“Anytime,” Aziraphale says, and his eyes are all of the colors and none of them, that plastic Santa Claus has not stopped waving. “Really,” he says, smiling, “I mean it. _Anytime_.”

“Right now?” he asks.

“Right now,” Aziraphale says, and they forget, this time, to come up for air. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> guess I gotta remove the Pretty Woman tag :)
> 
> the comments you leave me, oh god, they're so lovely. thank you always.


	10. exquisite corpse

The night is cold and it bites but it has no teeth. Not this time.

They walk home and the shopfronts are closed, the windows are shuttered. There is snow on the streets and they slide in it. The wetness licks into his shoes.

But Aziraphale’s hand is in his and with it all things become bearable. Become _good_.

The electric string lights that he had always thought to be too garish, too brightly colored, are now suddenly charming points of interest. The chips in the brick buildings are no longer imperfections— they are places for eyes to rest in and admire. The twisted handrails of ancient wrought iron are no longer rusted anachronisms, they are not things in need of updating.

The lenses with which he sees the world have become, apparently, rose-colored.

There is the pinch of that angelic gold pinkie ring against his palm and the smooth press of the pads of his fingers into the back of his hand— as if seeking out and counting all the bones there, feeling for tendons.

And he feels a bit as though they are the last two entities on earth— anachronisms themselves— terribly out of date and moving terribly slowly but persisting through a world that tried very hard to commit suicide. Survivors of a dystopia that never happened. 

The bookshop is gone but Aziraphale is with him now— and he considers wildly all the things he will do to accommodate him: acquire shelves for the books he will inevitably collect, purchase overstuffed armchairs in the most abhorrent patterns and prints he can find, find a large claw-foot soaking tub that might stretch to fit two.

A cup, he thinks, for his bathroom sink— for two toothbrushes that might kiss there.

His hands shake as he draws out his door key and Aziraphale takes it from him, draws the hand up to his mouth and kisses between the knuckles.

“Let me,” he says, and unlocks the door.

He wants to tell him as they pass down that hallway about the time a few hours ago Aziraphale had shoved him there. Wants to tell him to do it again only this time do it with lips and to put some teeth in it— press in against hips and feel the tell of what his blood has been saying this entire time. Tell Aziraphale to lift him by the throat and fuck him through the plaster.

But he says nothing because he still can’t get his tongue to work, get his mouth to move beyond the taste of Aziraphale in his mouth and everything is going to be okay, he tells himself— everything is _good_ now—

Except it might not be, and he cannot shake that fear even as they toe off their shoes, shrug out of their wet coats. It colors the back of his hands as he reaches for Aziraphale, reaches to pull him up close and inhale the scent of the skin by his mouth, along his cheek, drink in a bit of his breath.

They have not had enough time together, he thinks. They will _never_ have enough time together. Six-thousand years is nothing compared to the millennia they _could_ share— on this earth or another one and he knows he is a demon, he knows that he wants with a pathologic hunger— but the ache of potential left perpetually unfulfilled burns beneath his ribs, lights a fire in his throat.

“Aziraphale,” he says, because his name somehow encapsulates whole moods, entire planets of energy and desire and a lifetime of words left unsaid.

“ _Crowley_ ,” Aziraphale says back, and his eyes look so remarkably wet in this overhead light— and he thinks again of moss, of seagrass. Considers again that they might have another garden, someday, if they can somehow fool Heaven, fool Hell— perform at last a convincing enough magic trick. A transposition. One of Aziraphale’s double-lifts.

He kisses him before he realizes it. Shoves him back up against that wall and tongues the dull edge of his tiny angelic incisors. No sharpness. No bite.

“Want you,” he whispers, breathless and hungry and he doesn’t know where his glasses are, what room they are even standing in— Aziraphale pulling him somehow into the abstract spaces of his flat and guiding him into some place that he vaguely recognizes as his bedroom.

“Yes,” Aziraphale just says, and begins pulling, frantic, at any bit of clothing covering skin—ripping the shirt off over his head, fumbling desperate at the belt.

Their arms knock into each other, their palms cross paths and brush as if desirous of simple hand-holding instead of this wild-eyed pull for nudity, for closeness.

Crowley fumbles at the bowtie, is somehow amazed that Aziraphale lets him— too busy perhaps trying to wriggle the tight denim of his jeans off his hips.

“How do you even— mmph.” His mouth gets captured in a kiss and Aziraphale pulls back just long enough to finish his sentence. “—even get _into_ these?”

“For starters I’m usually,” Crowley starts, and bites at that spot just beneath Aziraphale’s ear, laying open the buttons on his waistcoat, “not erect.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Aziraphale says, and Crowley watches with wonder as his eyes roll back and then close, “I suppose that helps.”

The waistcoat comes down, and then the pale blue shirt, and it’s suddenly just Aziraphale in his underthings and socks, soft and brilliant and standing in his bedroom, waiting to be taken to bed.

Crowley steps back, peels down the rest of his own layers, lets himself be bare.

And there is music in their bodies once more— the dance again feels familiar. But he is still aware of the hard angles of himself, the bones that poke sharp beneath his skin and the eyes that shine like the Passchendaele sky— sick with the color of mustard gas and there are still scars there on his body from such a time— a calendar of wounds. He steps back and lets Aziraphale look— as if to say, _this is what you are signing up for._ Here lies the price of his admission.

His cheekbones are too sharp and his nose is too big, he knows, the sun stains him with freckles when he goes into the light.

Aziraphale is looking above his eyes, to his hair, then down low, between his legs. And he knows he is considering the color of it all. The absurdity. The hair on his head is too bright, too red— the color of rust or the color of aged blood, something left rotting on the earth. The bit between his legs is shockingly vivid. A comedy of color. Unnecessary and unwanted.

But Aziraphale does not look away and he can see the rise and fall of his eyes, can see the way they darken, linger on—

—the shadows by the collarbones, the sharp jut of hip through skin. He can see the edges of his ribs and his sternum beats flat on his chest with the heart punching up against it. He wants to reach in, take it out, see the workings of it and marvel at its construction. Check to see how human it is. How many chambers. Count the valves.

And even in this dim room he can see the brilliance of Crowley’s hair, the metallic, rosy gold— the color of kings— an extravagance of chroma.

“Beautiful,” he breathes, and then pulls at his own clothes.

He tries not to look up— it is easier to do this looking away. To not see the heat in Crowley’s eyes as the undershirt goes, and then the socks, and then finally the underwear. Stripped down to skin and he hopes that Crowley can see the emotion he has always carried now in the set of his shoulders, the beating of his pulse in his wrist.

And it is nice, he thinks, to be naked— to let Crowley see all of him all at once and to not have those lines of clothing suggesting that he is too soft in certain spots, too big in others. He tries to hide such suggestions between multiple layers, an abundance of buttons, bowties to draw the eye away.

“Aziraphale.”

He looks up because his name sounds _safe_ in Crowley’s mouth, always has, and he is suddenly not so worried about his softness, about his frustrating lack of edges.

 _He has what I lack_ , he thinks, and sees those strong angles moving toward him, his face suddenly in Crowley’s long-fingered hands, tilted by the jaw, kissed on the lips.

He tastes like campfire and copper, like whiskey he wants to get drunk on.

So he presses them together at the chest, the hips, the thighs, flattening together and moving backwards until Crowley’s legs kiss the mattress.

“On the bed,” he says, and is thrilled when Crowley obeys.

He is so hard, so bony— Aziraphale can trace the edges of his skeleton there underneath his skin, chart the map of his structure, the thing his flesh is stretched upon. And he knows that it’s all shifting— that if Crowley wished it could break and crack and reform into something monstrous and hungry— with claws and scales and maybe he will see it again someday, maybe those fangs can break his skin.

He is probably making too much noise into Crowley’s mouth at the thought, probably kissing too hard. He rocks his hips up against that flat stomach, the muscles underneath his skin there flexing and he rears back to look at them, to drag fingers down their ridge.

“Fuck,” Crowley breathes, and watches Aziraphale’s hand as it gathers up both of their cocks, presses their undersides together.

There are hands on his hips then, fingertips digging in and holding on—

—probably too tight, probably bruising. But the angel’s thumb is gathering the liquid at their tips and smearing it there, easing the electric rub of their skin.

And then there is a hand at his jaw, tilting his neck, lips suddenly on his mouth, next to it, sucking wet kisses against any available space. He moans into it, is incapable of reining in the sound that lives in his throat, the uncultured wheezing.

Aziraphale fits so easily in his lap and he knows he isn’t comfortable, isn’t soft or lovely or sweet— but the way Aziraphale is cupping his face and rocking into his cock, his fist, makes him think for just a moment that maybe that’s okay. That maybe he _is_ all angles and all edges and _is_ sharp like broken glass— but maybe Aziraphale prefers him that way. Maybe, he thinks— and Aziraphale bites down on the upward slant of his jawbone like he is hungry and Crowley is edible, _not poison_ — he is lovable _as is_.

The hand slides back, up behind his neck, pulling at his hair, and he has never felt more precious, more beloved. Aziraphale has seen his scars, has _made_ of a few of them himself— _loves him anyway_. He has seen his heart, black and weeping and up there on his sleeve, hidden under the floorboards and locked inside the basement— _loves him anyway_. There’s water damage down there. You cannot stress clean age out of a space. Can’t mop up the etch of time on the floor. The steps are out of code and the whole building is out of date— six thousand years out of date— _loves him anyway_. 

A non-conditional sale. Replace nothing. Move right in with the leaky pipes and the holes in the roof. Find happiness there with no expectation of change because the leaky pipes are humidifiers. The hole in the roof, perhaps, is a skylight.

He sinks his fingers into the curve of Aziraphale’s hip and tries to squeeze his eyes shut against their incessant watering. Rocks instead up into the heat of Aziraphale’s cock, his hand, the fingers he still has cupped around them.

“I’ll never,” he gasps, and his eyes are still so tightly closed, “have enough of you. _Never_ ever _ever_.”

And Aziraphale shuts him up with a kiss, sucking on his bottom lip and he’s _too hard_ , it’s too much— he isn’t going to last and he hates that— he needs this to stretch and exist impossibly in every second from now until eternity. Live forever in one moment. An angel in his lap and kissing him, _finally kissing him_.

“Nor I you,” Aziraphale whispers against his lips— and he should have expected it, really, that Aziraphale would be such a proficient kisser. All of that practice eating and all of those slices of cake, all of those chocolate covered cherries. He kisses him like he is tasting something good and Crowley lets him tilt his head back, lets him learn the topography of his too sharp teeth because suddenly, _maybe_ , they aren’t something to be ashamed of. Crooked and sharp and too many but Aziraphale is licking them not _despite_ their existence but perhaps, he thinks wildly, _because_ of it.

“So _sharp_ ,” Aziraphale breathes, pulling back long enough to look at them, consider them, his pupils blowing wide and his hips seeking friction.

“Is that okay?” Crowley asks, because he isn’t sure what this reaction is— this compressed heat that is suddenly leaking out of Aziraphale’s face. Six thousand years and he has never seen the hunger in his eyes like he sees on this bed, in his lap.

“It’s _perfect_. _You’re_ perfect—“

And Crowley doesn’t hear the rest of it because Aziraphale’s hand is suddenly fisted up in his hair, by his ears this time, and there is a mouth on his again, tugging at the bottom lip and it’s _swollen_ now, _so_ swollen and nearly painful but he never wants it to stop.

“ _Please_ ,” he bites out, when they pull back for the air that they do not need. “Can I have you?”

There is no hesitation, just a brief and breathless _always_ spilling out of Aziraphale’s mouth and they are sliding themselves inelegantly backwards onto the stretch of cotton sheets.

“Stay there,” Aziraphale says, and is reaching over into that bedside table, fumbling for what Crowley knows to be there— has been kept there in stock ever since their first time.

The cap goes and then he’s inverting it, sliding out a puddle of clear liquid into the cup of his hand.

He glances down at Crowley, breathless and decidedly, _beautifully_ pink, suddenly bashful.

“Would you?” He asks, and holds the palmful out in offering.

“Fuck. Yes. _Of course_.”

He bites out the words and dips fingers into that puddle, reaches down to where Aziraphale straddles him.

He slides a hand between their bodies, finds the warmth and the soft familiar skin, a moan when he touches him.

Aziraphale is biting his lip and Crowley detests suddenly the angle of their position, the angel’s lips are too far away, he cannot kiss his jaw.

But then he pushes a slick finger inside and Aziraphale punches out a moan, rocks down against his hand. And Crowley considers maybe that the angle _isn’t_ awful— because he can see the flush walking across Aziraphale’s chest, the pink spreading out from his thighs. There is that lovely velvet cock hard and leaking against his stomach and Crowley is suddenly thirsty for the taste of him, all of him, everywhere.

“That’s— _yes_ ,” Aziraphale is panting and shifting and Crowley adds a finger, wraps his free hand around that cock, strokes him through the stretch.

“Oh,” he says, and those not-quite-blue eyes open just a slit, shine down on him with mischief. “Can I help too?” He says, and he wets his lips with his tongue.

There is half a moment where Crowley is about to ask what he means and then Aziraphale is reaching behind himself, his hand still wet with the slick from the drawer and there is a finger next to Crowley’s— joining him inside.

“Fuck,” Crowley bites out, “you fucking— oh you— _angel_ I—“

“Yes, _yes_. That’s so good,” Aziraphale murmurs, his eyes sliding shut.

He cannot breathe and cannot think— rational thought leaving along with shame and indecision. His hips flex up into nothing, empty air, greedy in the search for pressure, _something_.

“Is it okay?” He asks, because Aziraphale’s fingers are considerably bigger than his own and the stretch must burn him with its intensity.

His jaw is flexed, Aziraphale’s eyes are closed. He sighs out a moan with each exhale, rocks down onto their fingers.

“Very— very good,” he manages, and opens his eyes.

“Too much?”

And he bites down on his cheek as he asks it— because he has always been too much, too _everything_ , needy and whiny and incessant.

“ _Never_ ,” Aziraphale says, and his hips make beautiful circles, their fingers rub up against each other.

“Can I have you now?” He asks, and his eyes are green again, Crowley realizes, green like that garden they came from, their first home, the place they might have again if they can make it that long.

Aziraphale pulls his hand free and wraps it instead around Crowley neglected beneath him, slicking his length with his palm.

“Always, _always_. _Yes_.” Crowley’s breath catches and he moves his hand out from between them, holds it firmly on that hip.

Aziraphale rises up to his knees a bit and holds him steady, sinks down onto him with impossible slowness.

And he knows Aziraphale told him to remember that feeling in front of the bookshop as the key to get into Heaven— the thing that will help him float. But he considers instead that this would work too: Aziraphale straddling his hips, lowering onto him, bottom lip sucked between those even white teeth and their hands have found each other by now, are interlocked and squeezing and slicked with lubricant.

Crowley realizes that he cannot move— not that he wants to— pinned beneath Aziraphale’s fantastic strength— hips flushed together and hands pressed together and those lovely soft thighs are squeezing at his bones, the tip of his cock feels so very deep.

He begins shivering because there is no movement— just the slow squeezing of Aziraphale’s muscles, the grip of him flexing and held still.

And he doesn’t think he’ll ever get over the realization that it’s _his_ body that is making Aziraphale moan— that it’s a part of _him_ that makes Aziraphale’s eyes roll back and his toes curl. He squeezes Aziraphale’s palms in his hands and then the angel starts to move— tiny shifting movements that press Crowley into the mattress, opening up around the stretch.

The motion is so small, highly electric— heated and compressed.

“Oh, _angel—_ fuck— _please_.”

Aziraphale is gasping like he cannot get enough air and the movements are nearly nothing— a persistent pressing of him into the bed as if he cannot get Crowley deep enough.

“Feels—“ Aziraphale inhales, his eyes opening again and those platinum eyelashes are fluttering, his chest is heaving. “Feels s— so good. Does it feel like me? Like— like before?” He asks, and he looks barely awake, dizzied apart into a multitude of pieces.

“Yes,” Crowley says, “it’s you— it’s you.”

 _Been you the whole time_ , he wants to say, and pulls their conjoined hands over to his mouth, presses a kiss against his knuckles.

“Glad,” Aziraphale gasps and pauses as he wiggles down onto him, presses into him hard enough that the bedsprings moan. “Glad to hear it.”

He rises up, sinks back down, and Crowley thinks he might be seeing stars, a whole cosmos, and he realizes suddenly that he has the potential for an entire eternity of this— eating and drinking and just _being_ with Aziraphale, making love whenever they want and kissing whenever they want. No one to tell them _no_. Labels they can choose for themselves.

Aziraphale breaks their hands apart. Places them splayed out on Crowley’s chest, over his heart—

—feeling for the relentless hammering of it underneath his skin, wishing he could lean in and soothe it from the inside, cradle it in his hands.

 _It won’t hurt_ , he wants to say, _not anymore_. And realizes that will only be the case if they can sink down into Hell, float up into Heaven, share skins and share secrets and he has to lean all the way into Crowley this time— there won’t be anyone else to catch him.

“Fuck me,” he says then, because he wants to feel something else.

His hands find Aziraphale’s hip then and dig in like they aren’t too big or too much, dig in like they are something to find treasure inside. His knees slide up behind him and their ankles lock together because there is not a place between their bodies that is not desperate for touch.

And then Crowley can do as he’s been told, can flex up and in and out and the angle is different, more shallow— but it lets him press into a place that scrubs away at rational thought, at shame and inhibition and replaces it instead with a pleasure that makes his teeth hurt.

He can’t find air, find his voice— and is only vaguely aware of the sound he is making, some hybrid vocalization of Crowley’s name and the words _love you, yes, fuck_.

“Yes, that’s it— fucking— get off on me, angel— _angel_.”

And Aziraphale knows dimly that Crowley will hold himself forever like this— will bite down on a lip or an arm or a hand to keep himself from coming too soon— will service Aziraphale without—

—thought of himself, as long as he wants, whatever he needs. Those chambers in his heart, the three or five or eight of them, will take turns delivering the motion of it. An engine for his pleasure. Work to deserve his affection.

That bottom lip is between Aziraphale’s teeth again and it should be in Crowley’s mouth he thinks— so he wraps a hand around his neck and pulls him down— doesn’t stop, presses into him deep.

There is a soft sound coming from one of them, aching and disbelieving and echoing between their teeth. An alphabet they had forgotten they knew how to speak. A dead language risen from the grave.

“I’m— Crowley I’m—“

“Yes. That’s it. _Please._ ”

Aziraphale finds his hands on his hip, pulls them away. And then Crowley’s get pinned to the mattress up by his ears, fisted along with the black sheets.

“I’m almost—“

Aziraphale is moving and moaning and he can’t seem to keep his eyes open. Sweat slicks between them.

“Me too,” Crowley says, and shivers up against Aziraphale’s strength and his heat and the impossible, splintering pleasure. And he realizes that the last time Aziraphale had been in this room they had been doing exactly this and he had not recovered from the ache of it until this moment. The burn of missing is gone. The wall between them demolished. Maybe time actually will heal them. If they are able to get enough of it.

“I— “ The sound gets choked out in his throat but he hasn’t said it yet— those three words and Aziraphale deserves to hear him say it, even if he knows it, has known it the whole time.

“Aziraphale, I—“ He swallows and feels splayed open, split apart. Held down by the wrists and held down by the hips and his heart is laid bare on his chest. On exhibition. A woman about to be sawed in half. The whole damn trick on display for the whole fucking audience.

He squeezes his eyes closed and breathes and remembers it’s just Aziraphale on top of him, holding him not _down_ but _steady_ and isn’t it something, he reminds himself, to be held at all.

“Crowley, _darling_ —“

Aziraphale is doing that lovely high-pitched breathing Crowley has learned he does when he is orgasmically close. A lilting musical sound that only happens when he has fully forgotten his manners and there is always that faint resonant quality reminiscent of celestial brass instruments beneath it, through it. Ethereality and grace and he deserves to hear it, Crowley thinks. He should hear it.

Aziraphale is crying out and trembling and it’s too much, _too much_.

“Angel I—“ and it feels too good to speak. He has trained his traitorous tongue to lie still in his mouth or be bitten in half and it is difficult to unlearn the things you have taught yourself, the things you learned for self-preservation.

“I— Aziraphale.” He pauses, sucks in air. “ _Love you_ ,” he breathes it out and the words he has kept corked and tightly capped taste strange in his mouth. Not wrong, just something to exercise and something to get used to. A stretch of a different sort.

Aziraphale’s eyes open and those hands squeeze his. Light spills across the ceiling— a perfect circle of brilliance cutting apart the dark of his bedroom. Aziraphale wears it like a crown.

It is something he had always worried about— worried after all of those long baths and those too-many bottles of wine, worried about when he had stayed too long and worried about when they had shared pastries and shared secrets, sipped each other’s coffees, sat in each other’s laps— that he would spill black all over Aziraphale’s white. Topple him like a book from a shelf.

And it’s something not unlike a miracle, he thinks, that the only times he has seen the angel’s halo have been when they’ve shared those secrets, lips, bodies, kisses. He hasn’t stained him, not even once.

“ _Oh,_ ” he isn’t crying, not quite, but it’s close— _he’s_ close— and Aziraphale’s mouth finds his and the light is blinding and the pleasure is blinding. Those hands holding his grip tight and there is an exquisite, impossible squeeze, a suspended moment of pleasure completing itself like a circle.

And then they’re coming— an orgasm sucked up tight in the strength of Aziraphale’s muscles and sustained along that edge. Speaking each other’s names into one another’s mouths like it’s a secret— trembling and sweating and he’s happy, he realizes. He has never been so happy.

Aziraphale is breathing against his jaw, their hands still holding and Crowley is smiling, he can’t help his smiling. The halo is dimming and he watches it disappear, wonders why Aziraphale always hides this particular magic trick.

There is a strange sort of effervescent energy locked in his chest that is threatening to escape his throat. A chimera of aged and bottled emotion. Happiness and sadness and sublime, _aching_ relief. He tries to swallow it down but he _can’t_ — and the next thing he knows there is something like laughter or maybe sobs coming out of his mouth, saltwater on his cheeks.

Aziraphale pulls back and peers down at him, unlocks their hands and smudges a thumb beneath his eye.

“Should I be insulted?” He asks, teasing.

And Crowley closes his eyes and bites down on his lip and can’t stop smiling, shaking his head.

“Sorry,” he says, and he feels too much of everything, all at once. A cup running endlessly over.

There are lips pressing into his forehead, then down onto his wet cheeks, the tip of his nose, his mouth. He feels precious and _enough_ and it’s too much to feel after six thousand years of nothing. He feels so incredibly naked.

He pulls apart his eyelids and looks down between them.

“Wait,” he starts, narrowing his eyes. “Did you—“

Aziraphale pulls back, bites slyly at his lip.

“Yes?” He asks, innocent as a summer day.

“You _did_. Without me— without touching—“

“You feel good,” he says, as if in explanation, and shifts on his lap.

“And your _halo_.”

“That felt good too,” he breathes, and licks his lips. “To hear you say it.”

Crowley presses his face into the hand that is up against his cheek, kisses along that life line.

“I like seeing it,” he murmurs, and hopes that Aziraphale can’t hear him.

The thumb rubs along his eyebrow, presses along his temple. The sweat on their bodies cools and he isn’t sure how long they sit there, Aziraphale still on his hips and a hand still up along his face. Tracing the edges of him.

He turns into it, kisses the pale wrist and the blood flowing underneath.

“We have work to do,” he says against skin.

“I know,” Aziraphale says, but does not pull away.

“I don’t want to,” he murmurs.

“I know.”

He butts his nose into the center of that palm, breathes in the smell of sex and sweat, that bottom note of _angel_ beneath it all.

“Let me clean you up first,” Crowley murmurs, and guides him out of his lap.

Aziraphale sits primly on the bed, thighs together and arm across his belly, smoothes a hand out across the sheets.

“I’ll be right back,” Crowley says, and then realizes that he can kiss him, _anytime_ , even if he is just leaving to go across the hall.

So he leans over, nearly shutters the movement at the sudden bit of pink along Aziraphale’s cheeks, and then completes it— presses a chaste kiss into the corner of his mouth.

“Hurry back,” he says, and licks that corner where Crowley’s lips had just been.

He barely remembers how legs work, how to _walk_ — with his heart so light and so _loud_. Every muscle feels boiled into jelly. His blood has been replaced with helium.

His clothes are still in a heap on the floor and there is still water along the glass door of the shower. And as he wets that singular black washcloth he realizes how little time had passed from their sitting in the shower in the dark to _now_ — eternally pulled into the light.

Aziraphale has not moved and Crowley reaches first for his arm across his belly, lifts it away to wipe at the line of smudged liquid there.

“Don’t hide this,” he murmurs as he does it, and presses a kiss above his navel.

“Lie back,” he says, and gets to mouth along those thighs when he does.

And he is thrilled to realize that those white marks are still there— his lines of quartz in a cliffside, those marks that have been a measure of dinner dates and wine-drunk evenings when they hadn’t a name for themselves yet.

But they do, _now_ , and he kisses his thanks against those pale lines for all their impatience, their stretching before things were ready. It had been a reminder at times that Aziraphale— his body at least— could be impetuous too.

“Thank you,” he says, and Crowley gets to look up from between his thighs when he says it, gets to kiss those lips, he knows, when he’s done.

“Always,” Crowley murmurs, a bit shy and a bit proud as he cleans away the mess of lubricant and _himself_ , everywhere, all over Aziraphale’s thighs and down the crease of him. There’s _too much_ of it and he is probably flushing, heat up high in his cheeks.

“You’re doing a very professional job, my dear,” Aziraphale says. “Made a bit of a mess of me, did you?”

“Sorry,” he mutters, and flexes his jaw, “there’s a _lot_.”

He looks up to see Aziraphale biting his lip and that, he realizes, is _a lot_ _too._

So he kisses once more against the inside of those fuzzy pale knees and crawls up through the space of them, takes Aziraphale’s lip between his own teeth instead.

“Mmph,” he makes an inelegant noise and drops the towel somewhere off the bed.

He doesn’t want to let go. He just got Aziraphale back and he is finally not a tourist, not an vagrant— he is finally _home_.

And there’s still a trial to face.

“It’ll be okay,” Aziraphale is saying and nodding because he must see the anxiety across his face, the fear in his eyes.

He brushes fingers across Crowley’s ear and it lights up a line of nerves in his neck, down his spine. He lets his arms relax, lies across the pale stretch of Aziraphale’s chest. Beneath the soft skin, his angelic heart beats without effort.

“What is it?” Aziraphale asks, because perhaps he can see the doubt in his face, the sudden rise of a memory he wishes he could shake.

“You didn’t wanna run off with me,” he says, and scrunches up his nose. And he wishes he hadn’t said it, not like this, not after such good sex and so many kisses. He is still, he supposes, built entirely out of barbs, broken glass.

“Sorry,” he shakes his head, blinks and wishes he had his sunglasses— even if they are lying naked and pressed together. “Don’t know where that came from.”

“No,” Aziraphale clears his throat and turns his head, looking out across the bedroom. “It’s quite alright.”

Fingers push through his hair, goosebumps rise up on Crowley’s arm.

“I hope you know I wanted to,” Aziraphale says, and it helps just to hear him say it.

“You did?” He breathes.

“I did,” Aziraphale says. “Still do.”

“Oh.”

Crowley looks out across the soft plane of his chest, lets himself rise and fall with the tides of angelic respiration.

“You drive far too fast though,” Aziraphale says, and a laugh that has been trapped in Crowley’s stomach rises up out of his mouth.

“My record is impeccable. I’ve never gotten us killed.”

Aziraphale tugs a bit roughly on his hair than strictly necessary, and hums thoughtfully.

“ _Yet_ ,” he murmurs.

Crowley pulls back and up and remembers once again with a thrill that he can kiss him. _It’s okay_. So he does.

And then he leans back and gathers himself up cross-legged on the bed, steels his nerves.

“We should do this,” he says.

He holds out a palm and Aziraphale’s hand slides into his— the life lines crossing and the heart lines intersecting and it’s going to be okay. He breathes.

“I suppose we should,” Aziraphale says. “Not sure when they’ll come for us.”

Crowley nods and shifts and squeezes at the palm in his.

“Better to… be prepared, I guess?”

Aziraphale’s eyes are not blue, not quite, and not green, not quite— and Crowley wonders what it will be like to look out at the world through them.

“Yes,” he says, “Should we— Do we both go at the same time or should— I mean, you could come in here with me or—?”

There is a bit of a flush to Aziraphale’s cheeks.

“Together,” Crowley says, “at the same time, I think.”

Aziraphale nods and swallows and he’s _nervous_ , Crowley realizes, because he has only done this the once.

“It’ll be okay—“

“—But what if we explode?”

“ _Angel_ ,” Crowley says. “We will not explode. If we were going to explode we would have the first time I—“ He bites off the end of his sentence.

Aziraphale raises his eyebrows and there’s something like a smile there and then Crowley is smiling too before he can help it. Heat pools between them.

“Fucked me?” Aziraphale asks, innocent.

Crowley closes his eyes and bites down on his cheek.

“ _Christ_ , angel.” He opens his eyes and flexes his jaw.

Aziraphale is doing that thing where he smiles without smiling and his cheeks are so pink, like ripe little apples, and there are no longer floorboards, the wall has been demolished.

“ _Focus_ ,” he says, and Aziraphale straightens his spine.

“You remember how to do this?”

Aziraphale shifts a little and there is still a flush across his chest, his pale skin dyed pink.

“Think so,” he says.

“I’ll guide you,” Crowley says, and swallows. “You’ll feel me here first,” he murmurs, and rubs a thumb across the center of his palm. “And then into the wrist,” he slides his hand down and the thumb down until it presses over that thin skin, the blue veins. “It will make a bridge. That’s when you go.”

Aziraphale’s eyes are dark and he nods, chewing at his lip.

“Okay,” he says, and Crowley watches his mouth move as he says it, watches him breathe. “Okay, I’m ready.”

Crowley nods, leans in once more for a kiss, chaste on the corner of his mouth.

“On the count of three,” he says.

They count down together.

“One.”

In harmony.

“Two.”

Matching twin accents.

“Three.”

Crowley can feel the skin beneath his hand lift up, as if degloving only not entirely uncomfortable— and then he is splitting apart, like when he shifts into a serpent only far more pleasant because he is sliding into some place that is warm and golden and it’s snug in here, even just here along the wrist, in the palm— soft and warm and he hums there for a moment, can feel Aziraphale sliding out of place along that bridge between them, hands still clasped and fingers intertwined.

And then he lets himself slide up the arm, into the chest, into place. All of it lambent and soft and—

— _hot_ , boiling hot and yet the air somehow is cold, _everywhere_ , like a wet blanket laying along his skin. There is so much space between his bones, between his joints, and it feels like Aziraphale isn’t going to fit in here— like he is going to get lost between the ridges of his spine and won’t be able to wriggle free. It’s tight in all the wrong places and loose in all the wrong places and there is a surprising tremor to his heart— as if it contains extra chambers, superfluous valves, working harder and beating stronger and his spirit has never had such an earthly machination for a muscle in his chest— it feels human and not-human. He can taste soil in his mouth from a millennia of being cursed to carry snake bones in his body, to slither along the ground.

He is aware that his knees ache in this position, that his spine feels like it will crack, the joints seem ill-fitting and he can feel—

—an ease to every muscle, a softness that belies strength. The hips don’t hurt and the shoulders don’t ache and they can hang there in their sockets and not fall entirely out, not sublux themselves beneath gravity.

The heart is strong and effortless and it does not gasp, it does not stutter. He would feel an incredible embarrassment for the inferior build of his own flesh were he not utterly besotted with the fluid workings of Aziraphale’s. Everything functions as it should. There is no water damage in the basement. There is no etch of time on the floors. The pipes don’t leak and there is no hole in the roof.

There is just ethereal power and a thrumming of something phosphorescent in its intensity— a brightness that forces a sort of giggling laughter out of his throat that he closes off with a slap of hand across a mouth that does not belong to him.

He opens his eyes and can see… _himself_. A perfect mirror.

It feels like someone walking over his grave. An eerie out-of-body terror because that is himself sitting across from him but it is also most assuredly _not_. It is the three-hundred and sixty degree sculpture of his skin tossed over Aziraphale.

And he blinks and blinks again because it is so impossibly _dark_ in this room where it hadn’t been a moment ago. The color has gone out along with the lights. He tries to clear his vision and then realizes that this is it— the best he will be able to see unless he gets better lightbulbs, invests in electric track lighting.

Across from him those eyes are still closed and he is still naked— and Crowley can see the myriad scars like scorch marks tucked along his body. A barbed-wire scar, multiple exit wounds, the shine of something silver and puffy up underneath his hair, above his ear.

He closes his eyes and swallows and the mouth is so neat. There are the proper number of teeth and the vault of his mouth is not so high, not so narrow. There are no fangs. The incisors are not sharp.

He opens his eyes again and can see—

—himself in perfect clarity, even in the dimness of this room. His eyes feel _dry_ , like blinking is less something to do without thinking and more something to avoid entirely.

He sees the hands first— Crowley’s, most definitely, but _his_ too, because he is controlling them— the long fingers and the deep nail beds, those veins and those tendons that stand out in beautiful spare contrast. He can feel the skin pull over top of them, the crack of joints as they flex.

And then he looks up and can see _himself_ , his new old body, pale and soft and there is probably too much around the middle, he thinks, his shoulders are so narrow.

“Ah, fuck,” Crowley is saying, only it’s in a voice Aziraphale has never heard before— Crowley through different vocal chords— and he is suddenly scrambling over for the bedside drawer.

“Please,” he says, and holds out a pair of glasses hooked around a finger in a gesture that is so shockingly, obviously Crowley it gives Aziraphale butterflies, “put these on.”

Aziraphale takes them and opens his mouth to protest.

“But I won’t be able to see—“

“You will.”

So he pulls them on and finds that the room itself is now pleasantly lit, not too bright or too dark.

“This is… _odd_ ,” Crowley says, and Aziraphale can see his own throat moving as he swallows.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale starts, flexing his hand, “why do the bones hurt?”

“What?”

“The— The hips,” he shifts a bit and it is terribly cold in this room. “They feel… not right.”

“S’raining,” he says, “ _snowing_ , actually.” As if that explains anything.

“Yes, dear,” Aziraphale bites out, “I realize that.”

“Joints get a bit of an ache in the rain,” he muses, as if this is not a cause for concern but rather par for the rather unfortunate course.

“ _Always_?”

“Eh, yeah,” Crowley says, “yours don’t, I’m learning.”

“Can’t say they do.”

“Ah,” Crowley looks down and away and Aziraphale can see now the thickness of his own throat, the bit of extra beneath his own chin. He looks away too.

“Sorry I just— you’ve never mentioned it before.”

Crowley glances back over at him and Aziraphale notices now that his ears are rather too large, his nose is all together a bit upturned.

“Figured it was normal,” Crowley shrugs.

“You should’ve told me,” Aziraphale says, and reaches that hand that is not his between them.

Crowley looks at it, takes it.

“Feels weird,” he says. “My skin is… not soft.”

“I’d say mine is _too_ soft,” Aziraphale murmurs, and then he remembers with a shock of embarrassment Gabriel telling him in no uncertain terms to get in shape.

His ears feel hot.

“I suppose the rest of me is rather soft as well, though.”

Crowley makes a pleased little sound and looks down at the skin he is wearing, smiles and touches a tentative hand over it.

“It is,” he says, but he says it like it’s not a bad thing.

“You,” Aziraphale starts, swallows— tries to sound nonchalant, “you don’t mind?”

“Love it, actually,” he says, as if commenting on the weather.

“Oh,” Aziraphale says, and he’ll never tire of hearing it. “Gabriel told me to, erm, _lose the gut_ , I believe he said.”

Crowley is frozen across from him, something coiled and deadly in the set of his spine— incredibly serpentine, even in that skin.

“He didn’t.”

“Yes, but I mean he was only—“

“I’ll fucking skin him.”

“Oh, it’s quite fine, really,” Aziraphale says, and thinks maybe he should’ve kept his mouth shut.

“I hope he’s there. I’ll spit hellfire at those pricks.”

“ _Crowley_ ,” he scolds, but it is entirely fond. “It’s fine,” he says, even though it’s not. “Really. Let’s get dressed.”

He watches Crowley flex his jaw only it’s on _his_ face, and it’s odd, of course it is, but perhaps not as strange as he had been expecting.

“Right.”

Crowley scrambles off the bed and seems surprised by the sturdiness of his new legs, of the lack of aching joints. He mumbles something that sounds remarkably like _solid as a rock_.

He begins picking up the discarded clothes, throwing at first the incorrect items to Aziraphale still on the bed and then realizing his mistake halfway through.

“You’re gonna have to tie this,” he says, later after Aziraphale has managed to shimmy his way into a pair of denim trousers that were remarkably both _too tight_ and _too stretchy_. He fiddles with the deep V of his shirt, scandalized by the amount of golden chest hair that is showing.

“Of course,” he murmurs, trying to both pull the shirt up and have it sit correctly on his shoulders. “Are you supposed to see this much?” He asks, his voice a rather high octave.

“Mm, yeah,” Crowley says, glancing up from the knot of bow tie in his hands. “Looks good. Bit high up though, init?”

Aziraphale gives up, decides that at least he had demanded an undershirt and the modesty of such a thing soothes a bit of the dismay he feels at having most of Crowley’s chest exposed.

“Darling,” he breathes, taking the bow tie from Crowley’s hands. “You’ve made a mess of this.”

He unties it deftly, pulls until it is centered on the back of his neck, attempts to fashion it backwards.

“Not quite used to tying it from this angle,” he muses.

Crowley, in his body, smiles without teeth and says with considerable cheek, “I have faith in you.”

The words sink into them both a moment later, and Crowley is no longer smiling. He puts his hands on top of Aziraphale’s, nearly finished with the folding of his bow-tie.

“I do,” he says, altogether more serious than Aziraphale has ever heard him, his own eyes staring back at him, “have faith in you.”

“Good,” Aziraphale says, Crowley’s incredible, ramshackle heart too loud in his chest, sucking up blood, “you’ll need it.”

* * *

Later, somewhere on that junction between Mayfair and Soho, on a Sunday morning after the world did not end, Crowley walks.

He walks toward what used to be the bookshop just as the sun is rising, just to complete the illusion of their magic trick.

And he smells it before he sees it— even in this body he can taste a bit of the air, can sense that something has changed.

There is not the smell of burning. There is no ash in the air.

His legs move quicker but they are still Aziraphale’s and still shorter than his own, more sure-footed, less fast. The heart that beats in his chest is strong and not weary, it swallows his anxiety and does not stutter. Not even as he turns the corner onto that familiar street, sees the red pillars, the human pseudonym on the glass.

He stops. He breathes.

It is something like seeing a ghost but bigger— memories and nostalgia distilled down into spirits and sent haunting the streets. It looms too large, he feels too hopeful.

He licks his lip and steels his nerves, walks up to the door and the threshold he had wavered at so many times, at night after leaving and in the morning before entering. Tied up in the strings of memories that hurt but no longer need to.

The door unlocks itself for him, remembering perhaps the imprints of Aziraphale’s palm on its doorknob and laying open beneath the familiarity.

He does not breathe as he enters, as he steps inside. It is completely the same— as best as he can remember it— there are still the messy stacks of books on every available surface, the specialty bibles that Aziraphale kept wrapped in case Crowley ever touched them there along the bottom shelf. There is still, he realizes, dust along the tabletops, on the floor. There is still that oil-stain from the first world war by the stairs.

In the back room he has the sudden revelation that they will not have to purchase another sofa, as their old one is just fine. He sinks down onto it and his chest feels too full of something like gratitude, it hurts with how good it feels.

He opens his eyes and there along the wall by Aziraphale’s perpetually cluttered desk is a row of books in cardinal red, _Just William_ in gold along their spines.

“Those’re new,” he murmurs, and rolls his eyes up to the ceiling, hoping that perhaps Adam, that wonderfully perceptive Antichrist, had remembered to restore the bathtub.

He closes his eyes and feels all at once like he wants to cry to someone, thank someone, anyone who will listen.

But there is no one here but himself, Aziraphale’s beautiful pale body.

So he snakes a hand up beneath his shirt and rests it over that heart that does not stutter, the one he had ached over for so many thousands of years. And he says a tiny whisper of thanks, of gratitude, for being so strong and for loving him back, _finally_. A whisper that to anyone else watching might look a lot like a prayer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, so this is it. One more tiny little epilogue and this beast is finished. Bless everyone for all of the beautiful comments you leave me. You are all so lovely and I don't deserve it.


	11. epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know Crowley's hair during dinner at the Ritz? Yeah.

And in the end, it really had been okay.

He had floated— arm-in-arm between Sandalphon and Uriel— in through the main entrance and up that long escalator, to where Gabriel had been waiting.

There had not been a trial, not in Heaven, and the injustice of such a thing burns still underneath his skin. Had burned him well enough then that he had not felt the heat of the hellfire, not even as he stood in the flaming center of it.

He had spit at Gabriel, like he’d said, and told Aziraphale about it later.

And Aziraphale had paled a bit at the retelling— had gotten a far off look in his eye, as if he had considered what such a moment would feel like— stepping into a flame that would burn him into ash.

 _The place for the heretics_ , Aziraphale had murmured, and then had kissed him rather soundly.

And Aziraphale had sunk— perfectly— down those stairs and had bathed in holy water— had slung his ankles up along the outside of that dingy bathtub because, he had said, that’s how he had bathed Crowley after the Blitz.

“No one would know that but me,” Crowley had said. And Aziraphale had kissed his palm.

“I know.”

They had switched back bodies at some point in St. James’ park, so close to that bandstand that still hurt Crowley to look at. And the feel of sliding out of Aziraphale and into himself felt less like coming home and more like leaving it, because the bones still ached and the shoulders don’t fit right but Aziraphale, at least, didn’t have to live in that house with a hole in the roof. 

They had walked out of the park with their hands holding each other, and Crowley had thought, again, how good it felt to be held at all.

The Bentley had smelled new again and not like smoke, and Aziraphale had let him know, in no uncertain terms, that he had wanted to make love in it very badly for about three decades now.

So they had— made love in the backseat after an unfortunate incident with the gear lever and a now bruised backside. Aziraphale had climbed into his lap and fucked himself down on Crowley through the fly of his jeans, like their first time, and had told him over and over again what it had felt like then and what it feels like now— how much he had loved him that night and hadn’t been able to say it.

“I didn’t think you’d fit,” Aziraphale is murmuring into his ear and the skin of it is now between his teeth, tugging— because Aziraphale has figured out that Crowley doesn’t mind being bitten, not at all. “But you did,” he gasps. “Eventually.”

“Thought I was gonna— _fuck_ — come out of my skin,” Crowley says, and Aziraphale squeezes around him.

“I wouldn’t have minded that,” he says, and Crowley files that bit of knowledge away for later— for a time that Aziraphale isn’t so tight and hot around him.

“You—“ Aziraphale gasps a bit, spread open and leaking all over their clothes, “you seemed so nervous.”

“I was,” Crowley squeezes out with his eyes closed tight. “Thought— nh, thought I was just— making you _dinner_.”

“Oh, _fuck_ , darling,” Aziraphale shivers around him and Crowley knows he has finally found that sweet spot. “Right there, _yes_ , don’t stop.”

There is a hand lacing through his hair, mussing it up and _squeezing_.

“Yeah, angel— that’s it, _oh fuck_.”

Crowley reaches between them, strokes him off as the windows fog.

“Love you,” Aziraphale is whispering in between moans. “Always— always.”

There is a hand around him, tugging Aziraphale still in his waistcoat up against him, flattened against the seat.

There is a bow tie close to his mouth and so he bites it, lets Aziraphale cry out against his cheek— and then they’re coming close enough together that they’ll call it simultaneous.

And then it all becomes a bit too much, like it often does these days— kneecapped by something like gratitude.

So Aziraphale stays in his lap a little while longer, presses kisses against his temple. He murmurs tiny secrets in his ear. Like that his hair looks like a copper diadem in the sunlight. Like that time he had carried him across a desert at night. Like how much he had loved the strawberries after their first time and that _The Exorcist_ is the only horror movie he’ll watch.

And then he tells him about Verdun. The place they had met up at after so many years apart. About how once— did he know?— it used to be filled with orchards, farmland, _gardens_. And then that war came and blew it apart into a moonscape, left unexploded armaments pressed into the earth. So the humans left and never returned.

And now, he tells him— and his hands are in Crowley’s hair, his nose is pressed up close to his jaw— one-hundred years later, the forest has grown back.

There are orchids there. And bats. Deer and foxes and toads.

There are other things too, he tells him, and presses a kiss into his temple.

“Apple trees,” he says. “The children of those orchards.”

Crowley’s eyes are closed and he can see it, feel it— the smooth trunk of apple-tree bark on his belly as he twists up it, drapes over her branches.

“They grew back?” Crowley whispers.

“They grew back,” Aziraphale says.

The pieces start to line up again and he helps Aziraphale back into his trousers, laces up his shoes. He holds the door for him because he knows that is what good husbands do and he hopes that maybe, someday, he can be that too.

“I kept the undershirt on,” Aziraphale is saying, later, across the white tablecloth.

“You didn’t have to,” Crowley says, and sips his wine. “Not much for modesty, me.”

His hair is probably a haystack from Aziraphale’s hands running through it, tugging at it. But his hips feel like jelly from a very recent orgasm and Aziraphale is smiling at him. The building could light on fire and he would not care, not in this moment.

“You _are_ the reason the humans wear clothing, dear.”

“Unintended side-effect,” he mutters.

He drums his fingertips on the table and there is suddenly a hand on top of his— not beneath the tablecloth and not hidden in the passing of cups— right out in the open. The curtain pulled back.

He stares down at it, his heart up in his throat.

He blinks and does not miss it.

No magic trick, not this time.

It curls around his and squeezes, in plain view, the whole world able to see it. The entire damned trick. The whole fucking audience.

He looks around in brief and clear panic, expecting perhaps someone to be staring at them, pointing, gasping. But there are just humans out to dinner, on dates themselves, and no one is paying them any mind at all.

He looks back to Aziraphale, saying something about champagne to a waiter and their hands are still touching, still held on top of the table.

The server leaves and Crowley clears his throat, tries to pretend like the hand on top of the table is not swiftly turning into some kind of museum piece that he will not move no matter how numb.

“I do appreciate you thinking of my virtue, though,” Crowley says, and hates that he can feel his ears growing hot.

He can see Aziraphale sucking at his teeth and Crowley can remember what it felt like to do the same thing, in the same mouth.

“Oh, don’t gild the lily, dear,” Aziraphale says, and looks primly down at his salad fork. “We fucked in the car on the way here.”

Crowley chokes a bit on his drink and is grateful, at least, for his sunglasses.

There is champagne being poured and Aziraphale moves his hand away, as if it hadn’t been pinning Crowley’s to the tablecloth like some kind of immense emotional paperweight.

He raises the glass and looks at him with so much light in his eyes, blinding and beautiful and Crowley is tired but it’s a _good_ tired. A deserved tired. An exhaustion that will be sated by many long baths and sleeping curled up alongside the most brilliant and bastardly angel he’s ever met.

And he knows now that if he really needed it that Aziraphale would sweep his legs out from under him, cradle him in his arms, carry him home.

Aziraphale will catch him, he thinks, the next time he falls.

His heart, with its too many chambers and ineffective machinery, doubles its pace. Sucks up too much blood. 

“I like to think,” Aziraphale is saying, and Crowley has to shake himself awake from the reverie of angelic strength, has to try and hide the flush on his cheeks and the incredible pull of his eyes up along Aziraphale’s shoulders, his arms. He bites on the inside of his cheek. Lets himself remember for just a moment how much power rests in that manicured hand that is currently holding a champagne flute.

“—that none of this would have worked out if you weren’t, at heart, just a little bit of a good person.”

The words are a lie, and they sting a bit, they always do— but it is a pleasant sort of burn. Especially coming out of Aziraphale’s mouth.

He has always been a shitty demon. He was never a very good angel.

And looking through his glasses at Aziraphale smiling at him, his lips still pink from being sucked on in the car, he realizes that he does not care about either of those things. Being good. Being bad. The angel sitting across from him finds him _enough_ , and that, he thinks, is all he really needs.

“And if you weren’t,” Crowley starts, figuring that Aziraphale isn’t very good either, but he is certainly good enough for the both of them, “deep down, just enough of a bastard to be worth knowing.”

 _Knowing_ , he thinks, sleepy and smiling and so very blissfully content, _in the biblical way_.

The apples of Aziraphale’s cheeks are ripe and pink and ready, he thinks, to be bitten— because he knows Aziraphale knows the double entendre of those words, had shyly acknowledged them with a raising and lowering of his eyelashes.

And what a marvelous thing, Crowley thinks, that they speak the same language. Can say two things at once, always, a double-lift. Maybe they have been doing that all along— only now Crowley is in on the trick. Aziraphale is showing him behind the curtain. The woman in the box getting sawed in half is just an illusion, he realizes. There is no blood. There never has been.

Aziraphale had hidden more than a few aces up his sleeve and Crowley considers that maybe he hadn’t been a bad magician, not at all. They had been doing proper magic the whole time.

The rims of their glasses kiss.

“To the world,” Crowley says, and he hopes that Aziraphale knows that when he says _world_ , he really means _him_.

“To the world.”

And something about the warmth in Aziraphale’s eyes, the wetness there, the light— as if the very beginning of a halo is threatening to slip out— makes him think that this time, at last, he does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you told me back in August when I started writing Strange Moons that it would become a 145,000 word monster spanning 12 decades I probably wouldn't have believed you. Many thanks to everyone that has yelled at me along the way and thank you always for indulging my head-canons that desperately needed to be put on paper.
> 
> I am absolutely going to revisit these two at some point in the future, and may be... writing some one-shots of mentioned historical moments in this series (summer of '69 jumps out) because I don't think I will ever be over the two of them randomly boning throughout the 20th century. 
> 
> also: there really are random apple trees growing in Verdun that were not cultivated. you can read more about it [here](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/verdun-battle-wildlife-refuge) if you wish! 
> 
> thank you always for comments. I _cherish_ them. see y'all on the flip side <3

**Author's Note:**

> Come sit around the communal fire that is [Tumblr](https://racketghost.tumblr.com), pull up a seat next to me :)

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  * [Under that great expanse of sky](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23419348) by [Nymphalis_antiopa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nymphalis_antiopa/pseuds/Nymphalis_antiopa)
  * [Letting Go](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23616841) by [AZFell_Ineffable](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AZFell_Ineffable/pseuds/AZFell_Ineffable)
  * [It looks rather awful](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24168556) by [Nymphalis_antiopa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nymphalis_antiopa/pseuds/Nymphalis_antiopa)
  * [Let me thank you for saving me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24341917) by [Nymphalis_antiopa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nymphalis_antiopa/pseuds/Nymphalis_antiopa)




End file.
